Tools for managing student behaviour and expectations

I know that the title of the posts sounds a little archaic. Shouldn’t we be worried about engaging students rather than ‘managing’ them? Surely we’re in the business of learning and not controlling. I’d agree with these sentiments and I’m sure they’ve been read here in this very blog a number of times.

This post isn’t so much about controlling students and coercing them to do as the teacher wishes, rather it is about using digital tools wisely to help students develop positive learning behaviours. It’s a bit like a transitional tool-kit to help students and teachers adjust to the new learning dynamics of an open, student-centred classroom environment.

See my last post for a bit of an over-view as to why I’m writing this post about ‘managing team work’. Simply put, managing team work is damn hard for teachers and students – the switch from passive to active learner is tough on students and will require some scaffolding and support.

ClassDojo – what is it?

Essentially it is a cool little online tool that allows you to award points (or deduct points) to students for certain behaviours chosen by the classroom teacher. It is designed to be used every lesson to monitor student behaviour – over time students become accustomed to the visual and audio cues that indicate that they have received a point for positive behaviour or, conversely, have had a point deducted for misbehaviour. I guess you should interpret the word ‘behaviour’ loosely. It’s more about classroom expectations.

According to the website, ClassDojo is ‘Realtime Behaviour Management Software’. I’ll be honest, when I first read that tag-line it didn’t sound too appealing. I like to think I don’t have behavioural issues in my class because kids are engaged in authentic, real-world projects. But that’s not true all of the time. It’s just not.

There are expectations that need to be established in all environments – especially environments where learning is hands-on, inquiry-based and involving young thinkers. I am a big fan of the 16 Habits of Mind devised by Art Costa and advocated by BIE. I am also a fan grrl of Assessment for Learning using the ‘Goals, Medals, Missions’ scaffold as devised by Geoff Petty. I think ClassDojo gives me the chance to easily implement both of these learning strategies into my PBL classroom.

Here’s a couple of screen captures of what it looks like:

Your class list appears on screen (best projected on an IWB or screen for students to see) like this:

Class list in ClassDojo

Teacher enters desired behaviours/expectations for students (the ones below are the sample ones given by ClassDojo – I’m thinking I will opt out of negative behaviours):

My expectations/behaviours will be the 16 Habits of Mind (HOM) … I think I’ll probably have 4 target HOM each lesson. The image below displays all 16:

16 Habits of Mind in ClassDojo

The teacher selects ‘start class’ and then during the class awards points to students for meeting expectations – using an iPhone as a remote or clicking on the screen, the students see their number on their avatar rise (or decrease) and hear an accompanying signal. The images below shows a student with a positive and a student with a negative:

 

 

 

At the end of the lesson the teacher can get a neat graph of the types of behaviours/expectations met during the lesson. Students can track if they have improved each lesson with printable PDFs that sum their performance over a period of time.

Why ClassDojo and PBL?

I like the idea of having a visual reminder of the expected behaviours required to work effectively with others and to work towards successfully completing a project. The fact that I can add any expectations/behaviours I like means that I don’t have to stick to those suggested by ClassDojo – it’s a nice flexible tool. I like that I can add in the target Habits of Mind and students can be rewarded for applying these in the lesson. From what I can tell from the comments on the edmodo ClassDojo group, students are really enjoying the system and it’s making them strive harder to meet target expectations.

I hope it works for my class – will check back with you in a week!!

PBL conundrum: How do teachers ‘manage’ project teams?

Visiting Riverside Girls High School to talk about PBL with a small group of teachers was a really wonderful experience. I’m not sure what I found the most pleasing, the fact that these are public school teachers like me keen to learn about PBL, the fact that they were each from a different KLA (including Maths, Science, HSIE, English, PD/H/PE and TAS) or the fact that we chatted for nearly five hours and I NEVER heard a negative or disparaging comment. I think the last point is what really excited me. These teachers were NOTHING but positive about getting stuck into PBL and doing all they can to make learning ‘real’ and ‘engaging’ for their learners.

One of the many questions that arose out of our discussions concerned the managing of teams. This is a skill that most teacher lack. Why? Because in the traditional teacher-centred classroom managing group work or team projects just didn’t happen that much. I guess Drama or Dance teachers would be adept at this, even PD/H/PE teachers, and these are some people that we should seek out for tips.

So the question went a bit like this, ‘Have you had any issues with the equal distribution of work within groups? Do you find some students carry the load whilst others barely contribute?’ I had a think about my experience with PBL over the last 12 months and felt confident answering that it hadn’t been an issue I’d noticed. I really haven’t, but I don’t suppose this is any reason to conclude that it doesn’t happen. One teacher in the group told us that she had used surveys at the end of a project to ask students who worked well in the team and who they felt didn’t contribute enough to the project. This information was used by the teacher to organise groups in the following project as well as helping her target the students that needed more support during the projects. This data was also used to identify students who the teacher would speak with 1-1 about their performance and see if there were any welfare issues contributing to the poorer performance.

We all agreed this experience  reveals the strength of PBL and not its weakness – PBL allows the teacher greater flexibility to engage with students on a 1-1 basis, thus any problems can be addressed rather than ignored. Finally an added bonus of this survey of contribution levels is that students were aware that their contribution was being monitored by both their peers and their teacher – a motivator to work more productively. Of course it can be argued that a failure to contribute may reflect deeper ruptures within group dynamics such as personality clashes or differing skill levels. It can also be argued that it may reflect a lack of engagement in the project. The former possibility may be countered by ensuring students assign roles and responsibilities at the outset of a project. A great post on the need for this type of group management can be found on Malyn  Mawby’s blog, here. The latter calls for the teacher to (re)evaluate the project itself using a project evaluation tool like this one. Rubric_Project_Design_June2010

I suggested a couple of tools that could be of assistance to help ‘manage’ group work more effectively, like ClassDojo and Memiary. I argued that both of these tools would assist in the managing of classroom behaviour and expectations. If we have both of these managed in our class, then we will be a good deal of the way to managing the issue of equal contribution to a team project. No?

Anyway, when I got home from Friday’s meeting at Riverside Girls HS I found an edmodo post that made my heart sink and made me feel a little foolish. But I like these types of shocks – they shake the foundations of my ‘PBL evangelism’ and make me rethink where I am going with student-centred pedagogies. So what was the edmodo post about? One of my Year 10 students posted that he didn’t like group-work because often only a small minority of the group did the mass of the work whilst the others mucked around and contributed minimally. Wow.

It was a timely reminder for me that PBL is hard and that quality project and people management is essential to effective PBL. It makes me panic a little that PBL isn’t right and I’m doing the wrong thing by my kids. Then I step away from my emotions and remember that life requires people to work together. These students are learning valuable skills in collaboration … this is one of those ‘just in time’ learning opportunities.

Year 10 and I will be having a little chat about collaboration skills on Monday. Looks like ClassDojo and Memiary are going to be getting their first airing in my classroom this week. Read about these tools here.

PBL + me = why?

Haha – do you like my catchy title? Does it make you think that I’m not liking PBL, that I’m questioning this pedagogy? Hmmm … maybe I am – but then, shouldn’t I be? After all I am a budding researcher who is being trained to look critically and find ‘gaps’ in research/practice that I may be able to ‘fill’.

But really I’m just preparing myself to present on PBL to a small group of enthusiastic teachers at Riverside Girls High School. I was asked by my friend Paul Jones to assist his staff in preparing for a ‘possible’ wider-school PBL adoption on 2012. A small group of interested teachers will be the ‘pilot’ team to plan and implement subject-specific and cross-faculty PBL. I am so excited to have been asked to help fellow teachers tackle the challenge of shifting from a teacher-centred to a student-centred pedagogy. Who knows, maybe this time next year these teachers will be part of my research into PBL and its relationship with digital technology usage, assessment for learning and the teaching of multiliteracies. Maybe I won’t put that pressure on them at our first meeting though, huh?

This post is essentially a means for me to do a mini-reflection on where I started with PBL and where I find myself now. I know that the road to here has been bumpy and confusing and I’m confident that it will be a similarly mind and body-jolting experience for the Riverside Girls teachers. But want I want to stress is the extreme benefits of this journey. The benefits are not just for the students – but for the teacher as well. Like what, you ask? Like being engaged with your learning as a professional, being challenged on a daily basis to respond to shifting student needs, by getting to know your students more personally as individuals and as learners and by feeling that what you’re doing is meaningful beyond the four walls of your classroom.

No known copyright: http://www.flickr.com/photos/osucommons/6170252894/

Dean Groom: I first started PBL because of this guy, Dean Groom. To be honest, I can’t even remember why I took interest in him and his ideas about education. I’m glad I did though. If you wanna have your ideas about education smashed to pieces every day or two then I suggest you read his blog here. Dean helped me to design my first PBL project. You can read about it here.

Suzie Boss: That project wasn’t what I would have called a success, and I wrote about that here. This post was found by Suzie Boss who used it as the basis for her own blog post here. It wasn’t until a little bit later I learnt that Suzie is a PBL guru working for Eduptopia.

Wider PBL community: This experience gave me insight into the amazingly supportive PBL community that is always accessible online. You can get great resources from BIE, read inspiring stories at Edutopia, watch useful ‘How-to’ videos on the BIE and Edutopia YouTube channels, join the PBL BIE community in edmodo, find amazing shared links at the PBL Diigo page, learn to craft a driving question thanks to this insane post (scroll towards the bottom) or follow the #pbl hashtag on twitter.

Trial and Error: The very best things in life take time – like understanding a really complex poem. I have written a series of blog posts questioning the effectiveness of PBL in my classroom and reflecting on the impact PBL is having on my students. You can read about this experience in the posts below:

Year 10 Project Based Learning: teething problems

Project Based Learning: The need for a determined attitude

Project Based Learning: Struggling

Is my PBL faux student-centred learning?

Fearless fun: A big part of PBL is risk-taking. Too often teaching is ‘safe’ and uninspired. Teachers feel comfortable standing at the front of the room referring to a textbook or handout. Teaching out the front can be effective if the teacher uses a whole class interactive method, but often teacher-centred lessons see teachers being didactic and students being passive. Teachers wanna have fun too, and sometimes fun involves throwing yourself off a cliff with the knowledge that at some point (preferably not too close to the ground) you’ll pull the shoot and land exhilarated at your success. I love those classes – they never cease to make me smile. I’ve blogged about a few of those lessons and included one below:

A priest, a prostitute and a thief: the hilarity of my Macbeth PBL ‘hook’ lesson

Meaningful assessment: One of the coolest parts about PBL is the assessments. They never suck and they’re never boring. If they do suck and they are boring than you’re not doing PBL right in my opinion. Assessment in PBL is both formative and summative. Check out my whinges – sorry, I mean ‘posts’ – about assessment below:

Assessment: out with the old and in with the new

Authentic assessment: sharing what we know

Authentic assessment and the HSC – a challenge?

Assessment and Project Based Learning

PBL and DER: changing the assessment landscape

I hope these posts come in handy to some of the teachers tomorrow!!

What tips do you have for teachers just starting out with PBL?

How can I shape the way the world sees me?

The title of this blog post is the driving question for my current Year 9 project. For the next three weeks my students will be working on shaping their digital footprints by creating digital content that reflects their passions. The main focus for the project is the creating and writing of a personal blog. I am calling this project ‘Passion-Driven Blogging’.

After a frantic series of tweets last night (see below) I was given some wonderful ideas about blogging. The most exciting connection was with David Mitchell who suggested that I participate in his QuadBlogging project. You can read about QuadBlogging here but essentially it connects four schools together for the sole purpose of sharing student blogs. It ensures that students who blog get a wider readership but also has the wonderful added benefit of cultivating a critical eye in the young bloggers as they provide feedback on the blogs of their peers.

Just an hour ago I had my first lesson with my wonderful Year 9 class. It is the very first day back after Spring break and my students were keen to know what unit we were moving on to. Ever the one to encourage suspense I simply raised my eyebrows and stayed silent.

The lesson began with me showing the students a series of YouTube clips and discussing the purpose and audience of each clip as well as the way in which the internet was represented in each. Very quickly the students began guessing as to the focus of our unit – was it YouTube, was it cyber safety, was it looking at the pros and cons of the internet?

Here’s the clips we watched:

After a quick chat about the different attitudes adults (especially parents and teachers) have about the internet and digital idenitity, I set the students the task of googling themselves. Before they jumped on their computers I showed them a google of my name and asked them to skim through the search results (on both images and web) and see if my search was a ‘healthy google’ or an ‘unhealthy google’. They all agree it was healthy and I prompted them to explain why. Obvious answers abounded: nothing bad was found, nothing embarrassing, my positive online behaviours could be seen, I love education and people could see that. I asked them what the search revealed about my passions. They all acknowledged that the search revealed that I am passionate about education.

Coo, huh?

So the kids then googled themselves and had a bit of a laugh about what they found. I used one student as an example to show the class (with her permission – thanks Alex) and asked the students what we could tell about her passions. There wasn’t much to be said. All that turned up in her search was the obvious social networking sites. So how what do I know about her from the search? Not much.

I have one more period with my students today. The task? Ask them to write a paragraph explaining what they are passionate about and what they would like to be known for. Give them the driving question …

Oh, and we’ll watch the clip below about blogging and begin researching the best blogging site for each one of them to use.

PBL and DER: changing the assessment landscape

My Year 11 extension class (very soon to be Year 12 extension class) have reconfirmed my love of the project-based approach to teaching and learning. These guys – all your typical bookish, Extension students, lovers of writing and reading, all likely to *miraculously* get the ‘verbal linguistic’ badge on a Multiple Intelligences test – are not the kids you’d expect to revel in a student-centred project-based classroom. But they have created amazing, amazing things I would never have seen had it not been for PBL.

If you want to get an overview of the project, check out my earlier post: My paperless extension Year 11 class – who said DER was DEAD? What I wanted to focus on with this post is the final presentations and how the project was assessed.

Keeping in line with my valuing of ‘assessment for learning’ or what is also referred to as formative assessment and the PBL model I use influenced by BIE, I ensured that students were assessed throughout the project. The project was to be completed individually and students were given 7 weeks to complete all tasks in preparation for their presentation of learning to the class. Below are the tasks:

PART A: Investigation – 5% (week 6)

ORIGINAL TEXT: 5 ELEMENTS, CONTEXTUAL ELEMENTS
APPROPRIATION: 5 ELEMENTS, CONTEXTUAL ELEMENTS
(approx. 750-1000 words)

PART B: Draft website (including draft appropriation) – 5% (week 7)
NB appropriation guidelines:

• short film (3-5 minutes)
• digi-story (2-3 minutes)
• narrative poem or suite of poems (no more than 30 lines in total)
• dramatic reading of a narrative (3-5 minutes)
• interactive multimedia narrative (max 15 minutes to navigate all screens)
• short story (1000-1500 words)
• picture book (max 10 openings)
• play (performance time max 10 minutes)
• radio play (performance time max 10 minutes)
• recorded monologue (3-5 minutes)
• other – see teacher with your idea
PART C: Presentation (5 minutes speech + presentation of appropriation) – 5% (week 8 )

You are to present your research and appropriation to your peers.

PART D: Website (including journal) – 5% (week 8 )

5 pages on website: research into BOTH texts (one page per text – 500wds per page); learning journal entries (one per week minimum 250 words each w/ links and videos); draft appropriation and final appropriation.

All tasks were turned in on edmodo and links to the developing websites were posted to the class edmodo group to the chorus of ‘ohhs and ahhhs’ as students looked at one another’s sites.

The final websites were amazing – so clever, colourful, engaging, full of rich and meaningful content. These students owned their work, and what’s more it was available to a live real-world audience. What impressed me even more was the standard of the appropriations that the students created. They all did something very different – none of the pieces created were ‘teacher-led’ or bland. They all reflect a tiny piece of these students – capturing their skills and knowledge at this point. Reflecting their passion and commitment.

As can be seen above, the final assessment for this project was the presentation. This is in line with the PBL framework where students are required to present their learning to an audience. My students presented to each other and me. This is pretty much your usual classroom presentation – nothing fancy in the set up but what was interesting for me was how the presentations were assessed. Having read Black & Williams (Inside the Black Box) as well as Petty (Evidenced Based Teaching) and Hattie (Visible Learning. A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement) I am keen to introduce more peer and self-assessment into my programming. It makes sense that up-skilling students on self and peer assessment will improve learning. It’s almost impossible to master a skill or some content if you don’t know what needs to be mastered – we all need some form of criteria to guide us.

My experience is that the students traditionally viewed as ‘very capable’ tend to fear self-assessment more than teacher or peer-assessment. In fact, peer-assessment isn’t something they’re dearly fond of either. These students often resent being ‘assessed’ by anyone but teacher. Why? Maybe it’s because for these students more than any the ‘gold star’ is crucial to their learning experience. They crave the grade – their sense of place in the school hierarchy depends on it. They have been conditioned to learn in light of a grade.

When I told my Year 11 class they would assess each other’s final presentations they were apprehensive. The sweat beads dried when I told them peer-marks would only account for 20% of the final grade. The sweat beads returned when I told them self-assessment was necessary also. I asked them what was a fair proportion for the self-assessment grade. They pleaded for 5%. I laughed. I explained why self-assessment is crucial to their development as effective life-long learners. They nodded. I argued for 20%. They got me down to 10%.

“So how does this peer and self-assessment work, Ms Hewes?”

Great question. I had two options. I could give them the criteria I had created myself for the presentations or I could get them to create one themselves as a class. Knowing the teacher-babble of my criteria, I got down in their mire of criteria writing with my class – all the while with one eye on the clock knowing my lesson time was shrinking by the minute. How do you create a criteria with students? Simple – just ask them what the task required them to do and what a great presentation might look like. After a really deep chat (and sometimes debate) the students decided on 7 criteria. I triple-checked with them that they were happy with the list – they were 🙂

During each student’s presentation the class were to use the criteria to assess their peers. At the conclusion of each presentation they typed their feedback based on each criteria into an edmodo note and posted it to the class group. They completed this process for their own presentations as well – self-assessment. I used the same criteria to mark the students – haha!

So what did they present? Check out their awesome work:

10 Things I Hate About Shrew

Second Star to the Right,  and Straight on til Morning

Lost in Wonderland

Red Riding Hood

The Hyde Complex 

Pig on a Stick – A Threat to Civilisation