August 2011 – Page 3 – Montessori Muddle

Letting Students Personalize their Grading Scheme

How do you know if a student has mastered a subject? How do you get students to better understand how they learn and take more control of their education? I’ve been thinking that giving them more control of their grading might be the answer.

Test grades give some information, but experiments can be just as, if not more, informative. Much depends on the learning style of the student and how they express themselves. Verbally oriented might be good at processing written information and putting what they learned on paper. Kinesthetic-oriented students are likely to do better with practical demonstrations and labs that require movement and coordination.

Since there’s some merit to both exams and laboratory experiments – tests are good for checking the understanding of basic facts, while good labs require application of concepts – they have to be somehow added together to determine if and how well as student has mastered the topic.

Usually, the different types of assessment are combined with different weights. 60% of the total grade for a class might come from exam scores, and 40% from labs. But, given the different talents of different students, might it not make more sense to adjust the weights based on the specific student.

In fact, it would probably be even better to have the students decide for themselves on their own personal grading scheme. It could be part of a classroom contract.

Students would have a strong incentive to come up with their own most beneficial grading system, and, if you gave them a little time to understand the exam and lab requirements (say half a semester) before coming up with the weights, they’d have a lot of incentive to really try to understand how they learn best, and how to demonstrate that knowledge.

Once they’d made a decision on grading weights, they could then focus more energy on the parts of the class they find interesting, which, if we’re lucky, make them more motivated to learn the subject. Then they could set out to acquire the same information and concepts from what is to them a more interesting perspective, without having to worry so much about the stress of struggling through those activities they find difficult and tedious.

A student who is good at experiments might learn the facts in the textbook better if they were looking up information for an experiment – a big picture to little picture perspective – while a student who’s read and understands the text might find the experiments a lot easier to deal with (and so perform better) if they’re less worried about getting the perfect grade.

There would probably have to set some limits as to how much they could play with the weights, say plus or minus 15%, but individualized, self-assigned weights could be a very powerful way of tailoring education, especially in a context where grades are necessary.

Facilitating Movement in the Classroom

… the part of the brain that processes movement is the same part of the brain that processes learning.

— Jensen (2005): Movement and Learning in Teaching with the Brain in Mind.

I’m setting up a new classroom this year. How it’s arranged is very important to me. Montessori classrooms are designed for open movement and having different things going on in different places at the same time. Unlike last year, I won’t have to manage the entire middle school in the same room for the entire day. Instead, middle and high-school students will come in for two-hour periods for math and science.

Two hours is a long time for anyone, so I don’t expect them to be able to sit still for the entire period. In fact, just like in last year’s middle school classroom, I intend that the class devolve into smaller groups for most of that time. Students will need to be able to move around freely and associate freely, so long as they respect each others ability to work. I’m trying to arrange the room to facilitate that.

So how to arrange the furniture?

I need open spaces for students to walk and move. Eric Jensen has an entire chapter of Teaching with the Brain in Mind dedicated to how important movement is to learning. His focus is primarily on the need to save time for recesses and PE in increasingly regimented school days, but he also talks about integrating movement into everyday learning: energizers to wake kids up; stretching for more oxygen; and so on. I certainly know that I do a lot of pacing when I’m trying to think.

David Walsh also sees movement in the classroom as particularly important for boys.

Adolescent boys can have five to seven surges of testosterone every day. … And because testosterone is geared towards quick release, adolescent boys are prone to follow any impulse that might release stress. [p. 62]

…

Some experts think that making students sit still at a desk all day isn’t good for either sex, but girls are better able to tolerate it. Boys are more likely to get frustrated by school and loose interest. [p. 100]

— Walsh (2004): Why Do They Act That Way.

So no rows of desks. Instead, I’ve tried to make different work areas.

There’s one big area with a set of tables along three sides of a rectangle facing the whiteboard; students can be inside or outside of the rectangle depending on their needs.
Another area is centered around the couch, which may seem highly desirable, but I’ll be curious to see how they use it to work.
Toward the back of the room, there’s a solitary, larger-than-normal desk for a larger group that need space from the big set of tables.
I also have a smaller table near the window, that I envision would appeal to smaller, quieter groups, or even individuals sharing the same table.
And, finally, there is a bank of individual work spaces along the back wall.

That’s the plan, anyway. Classes have not started yet, so we’ll see how it holds up when it meets the ~~enemy~~ students. I am always happy to let them rearrange things, but most often they don’t seem to want to spend the time and effort.

A Few of My Unpublished 9/11 Pictures

ny-2-36-f800 — Lower Manhatten on the evening of 9/11 2001.

I was sorting through my slide collection, while preparing for our recent move, and came across my binder of slides from New York on 9/11. These are actual, physical slides, organized neatly in plastic binder pages, not digital images.

If I remember correctly, I was just visiting the city that day, staying with my grandparents in Brooklyn. The visit was for work, I’d a post-doc lined up at Columbia and I’d lived in the city before, so I’d not thought to bring my camera with me.

So I walked into Manhattan, against the crowds turned out by the silent subways. Edging against the flux of humanity walking across the bridges away from the tragedy.

And I bought a camera, on the afternoon of September 11th, in a small shop somewhere around 32nd Street. The proprietor was sitting behind the glass cases, following what was going on outside on a small television set. Fortunately, the electricity and credit card system were still working. He was happy to sell me a good, used, fully manual Pentax K1000 (just like the one I’d left at home), and enough slide film to get me through the day.

I’ve always had faith in the strength and resiliency of New York. It’s where I’d spent my first four years, as an impressionable teenager, after immigrating to the U.S., but I would not have been able to harbor any doubts about those first, likely naive, impressions after that day. And this was without seeing or even knowing about the heroics at the World Trade Center. All I could see was the calm and matter-of-factness of the people on the street. Though the arteries had clogged, the blood of the city, its people, still flowed.

Nor was I the only one headed towards the dense clouds of smoke, made eerily attractive by the clear sunlight and pellucid skies of that clear September day. I don’t think I would have made it over the bridge if there were not a few other people, hugging against the railing, edging their way across. That infinitesimal trickle turned into a small but steady stream on the streets of Manhattan itself, which was then dammed up by the police line at Canal Street. Being unable to see anything from there, I turned left and joined the crowd this time as took me back across the Manhattan Bridge back into Brooklyn.

ny-2-37-f800b — A flag flies over the Brooklyn Bridge.

I figured the opposite waterfront would be the best place of any for me to get any glimpse of what was going on. So, once across, I looped under the eastern side of the bridge and walked along the roads that edge the shore until I ended up in Brooklyn Bridge Park.

The picture at the top of the post is from the Brooklyn Bridge Park. I managed to get two major icons into the frame that are important personal symbols: a piece of the Brooklyn Bridge is on the right edge and, if you squint, you can see the Statue of Liberty (my favorite landmark) on the left. They’re a good reminder of the history and purpose of this great city. I also like that the picture captures the silhouette of the city dove, a graceful symbol of peace, standing against the roiling clouds of smoke, dust and turmoil.

Adolescents Versus Their Brains

The part of the brain responsible for logic and reasoning is slow to develop compared to the rest during our adolescence. As a result, adolescents are driven way too much by their emotions and instincts. This means that a lot of the time someone else, teachers and parents usually, have to provide that rationality for them, and help them develop those thinking skills for themselves.

That, at least, was my take-home message after reading David Walsh’s excellent book Why Do They Act That Way. He does an excellent job explaining how the brain develops during adolescence, how it affects the way teenagers behave, and some of the best approaches to dealing with it.

There are a lot of excellent details about how brain development interacts with hormones to create many of the behaviors we find typical of teenagers. Since puberty proceeds differently for girls and boys, Walsh also highlights the differences in the timing of development, and the contrasting results of the different hormones released.

Yet, he also recognizes that adolescent behavior is not solely the result of biology. The effects of neurological and hormonal changes are amplified in industrial societies where kids spend less time with parents, and more time with peers, than in non-WIERD cultures (see The Myth of Adolescent Angst) which leads into his approach to dealing with teens.

To address this unfortunate combination of nature and culture, Walsh advocates a structured approach to parenting, where rules are clear, reasonable, and enforced. This, however, needs to be balanced with the need to keep lines of communication open, which is not an easy trick. Teenagers will want to push you away, but it’s necessary to keep connected to them anyway.

He also emphasizes the need for mentoring good behavior and rational thinking, because, as we’ve seen before, while the developing pre-frontal cortex provides the capacity for formal thinking, it needs practice and training to work well. And, after all, two of the key things we ultimately look for in adults are self-control and the ability to think rationally.

This book is an extremely useful read for parents and teachers (though the first chapter is a bit slow for the impatient). It does a great job of explaining how biology affects behavior, and how to deal with them. I particularly like fact that Walsh has found that teens find it useful to know all this biology stuff too, and it affects how they behave.

Guide to Using a Microscope

Sitting innocuously on the clearance table at a Barnes & Noble (in Cedar Rapid, Iowa actually) was a copy of Georg Stehli’s The Microscope and How to Use It.

At 75% off it was less than $3, which is quite a steal for a guide to what I found to be the most fascinating piece of scientific equipment for my middle schoolers. One of their first natural world lessons was on how to use the microscope. In the classroom there was always one sitting on the shelf, protected by its translucent plastic cover, but easily accessible.

I also took one everywhere, including to the cabins on our immersion trips, which is where they discovered the crystalline structure of salt and sugar grains, and the microfossils at Coon Creek.

And, interestingly enough, my microscopy posts are some of the most popular posts on this blog (the onion cell is regularly in the top ten).

The Microscope and how to use it by Georg Stehli.

Apart from the basics of how to use a microscope, Stehli’s book goes into simple sample preparations and preservation for almost everything you’re likely to encounter in the curriculum, in the classroom, and in the back yard. Though neither crystal structure nor microfossils are covered, the techniques for looking a the hard parts of biological specimens are applicable.

I would have loved to have had a copy of this last year when I was trying to figure out which were the best dyes to use for some of the odder samples my students came up with, and how to make them into permanent slides. It’s not easy to find this kind of broad reference online.

Serialized Canticle

The science fiction classic,A Canticle for Leibowitz, is available in the public domain as an adapted audio serial from Old Time Radio via the Internet Archive.

Inspired by the author’s participation in the Allied bombing of the monastery at Monte Cassino during World War II, the novel is considered a masterpiece by literary critics. It has been compared favorably with the works of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Walker Percy, and its themes of religion, recurrence, and church versus state have generated a significant body of scholarly research.

— Internet Archive

You can play it here.