Self-Assessment, Gradeless Learning, and Teacher Well-Being

Speaker 1 Welcome everyone to our October summit with Star Saxstein, who's a prolific author. She's written many books as well as a nationally board certified teacher. The focus is going to be on self assessment, gradeless learning, and that connection to teacher well-being. Star and I were just talking about how the the elements of progressive education that we're talking about today not only lend themselves to students being more comfortable in the classroom and doing better, but also for the teacher, it lessens stress. You have more time at home to do things. It's just a more fun, engaging thing to do. You know, it's the reason why people became teachers is to teach not to become, like, authoritarian rulers over their classroom, and this gives you some tools to make those things easier. So this is brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm gonna shout some three names here, Bradley Hinson, Lisa Biber, and Paul Wan. Thank you for supporting HRP so we can pay for the fancy technology we're working with here today. That's really appreciated. And for those of you that are in our audience, feel free to participate via the chat. You can type in the chat box. Or if at any time you have a comment or a question, hit the raise hand button, which should be near the bottom of your screen, I believe, or maybe the top. It looks like that. That is a key tool here. The more audience participation we have, the better this is gonna be. Feel free to ask hyper specific questions to your context because I think that's where the real meat of these conversations lie. We can actually help you, especially Star can help you integrate these techniques into your classroom. If you're not familiar, my name is Chris McNutt. I'm a cofounder of Human Restoration Project. We host free professional development. We have a bunch of free resource resources on our website, and our focus is on progressive education and ensuring that we're focusing on humans in our class as opposed to just like little robots or little vessels that are just getting translated information to them. And, Star, I'll let you introduce yourself.

Speaker 2 Okay. So I'm Star Saxe Dean. I am currently an educational consultant speaker. It I I I mostly consider myself an instructional coach more than anything. The format that I'm in now is, like, I get to go into schools and work with teams over time to bring the formative assessment process really into their spaces, helping to make the kids really the center of the learning and to help folks kind of shift their assessment practices. Before that, I was a sixteen year high school English teacher. Everything I've taught everything from seventh grade humanities to twelfth grade AP lit journalism and a bunch of newspaper classes. I was a district leader for two years, a director of humanities where I got to lead a department of various different subjects and got to try that head on for a little bit. Now I just really it's like my crusade to help reform education as it is, and I think ultimately, I will say that my career has been a success if I could help get rid of standardized testing altogether and sort of move towards a more portfolio based reflection self assessment system where students and their dignity are kept intact instead of running them through this really sad sort of system we've got working right now that was put in place, I guess, out of necessity. God knows how long ago at this point. So it's time for a reboot, and hopefully, I could be a part of that. So

Speaker 1 Awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much for giving up your your morning to speak with us, especially early morning for for some of us here. I also love that terminology. Crusade is is, like, right up my alley in terms of, talking about the education system. I love that. So our goal is to talk for roughly an hour here, going through four different questions. And essentially, what we're doing is we're just talking about how gradeless learning can be implemented, how self assessment kind of caters itself to gradeless learning, and then how all of that ultimately feeds back to teacher well-being. We already have a lot of conversations, I think, about how students benefit from gradeless learning. So, you know, talking about motivation and not meeting students and not being judged and just in general, actually learning more, which is very interesting, considerably more in some studies even when it comes to traditional academics. But there is that teacher component here. So again, feel free to hap happily engage in chat here, folks, or raise your hand if you wanna participate. But let's just jump right into the questions here with Star. So let's just start with this first one, which is basically I mean, you've been doing this for a while now, gradeless learning, talking about gradeless learning. You have a ton of resources and books. Could you talk about how gradeless learning then changes the teacher's role within the classroom?

Speaker 2 So, I mean, I there's a bunch of different things at at in practice here, I think. For one, you're not gonna grade everything that the kids do, and it thinks about learning on a spectrum instead. So you have this more progressive shifting and student needs become the center of what you're doing. So even in the way you're planning your lessons, the way you're kind of making the space all kind of goes around what kids know and can do. You want them to be setting the goals. You want them to be making the priorities, and then you're able to sort of adjust what's going on. I know some traditional folks might have in their head right away, well, what about the curriculum? There are state tests at the end of the year. There's stuff we have to get through. And what's amazing is you get through all of that stuff anyway. It's just maybe it's not the chronological approach that takes forever. If we think about things more thematically and we have things chunked in themes where kids are doing projects and they have some flexibility in in what they're learning and when they're learning it, and we're just connecting everything they learned to whatever we're doing in that space. First of all, it's it's so much better for the teacher because then we get to do the stuff we love most, actually work with kids one on one or in small groups on the specific things they need instead of preparing lectures or PowerPoints or things like that. It's more of a workshop model. So you might have a mini lesson because you do have that content you need to teach or you do have that skill that, you know, kids need to keep working on, but it's mostly a workshop. So kids are doing. You have your five or six minutes in the front, and then you're spending time individually while they're working where, you know, you're either doing status of the class, kind of getting a gauge of where kids are, and then you're working with kids individually based on data you might have collected the day before, or you might find out while you're walking around that everybody has a misconception about what you're learning, so you could just kind of shut the class down for a second and say, alright. You know, after taking a brief overview of what's going on, I just want to do a quick two minute review of what's going on, address any concerns that I hear you guys talking about in your groups, and then it really just makes the learning space a little bit more dynamic because you can't plan for every second. You kinda need to be versatile and ready to shift based on what the kids need. So for me, I don't have ADD, but I think that, you know, just I I bore really easily. And when you're in a space where you're doing the same thing that you did last year at the exact same time that you did it last year, and there's only one right answer for every single thing that you're doing, that is really boring. And if you're going to be a teacher for any long period of time, unless you're willing to change things up, stuff's going to get real real boring real fast. So I I think it just gives us a chance to be more creative as well, letting kids be a part of that whole process, letting them co create the curriculum that we're teaching and also letting them sort of dictate where we go and how we how we go.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That I mean, speaking of which, I mean, I also teach in, like, a portfolio based gradeless classroom. And part of the invigorating essence of that room is the fact that students often produce things that are very unexpected and very creative and very cool even when I think they're not going to, which sounds like really bad, but it's true. So sometimes students really surprise me because, like, they won't be doing anything to my eyes for, like, a week and then out of nowhere, they produce a video game or, some crazy animation or something out of nowhere. And it's really, like, it feels so good to see students who traditionally struggle because they're just giving them a lot of work time and it's not very traditional that they can really thrive and showcase what they're capable of. And you alluded to this in your introduction, but could you talk a little bit more about what exactly a portfolio based grading system looks like within the classroom?

Speaker 2 Okay. So when I was in the classroom, we have, like, a four step process. The collection part where based any any kind of product or portion of a product that students felt showed their learning could be collected. Some people I worked with actually used folders, like physical folders. I used the digital one once our school went to Google. It made good sense to just teach kids how to maintain the space and then at the end develop the portfolio that they were gonna share. The second part is then selection from the collection because a portfolio isn't just everything I worked on all year. There actually has to be some level of thought about why they're putting something into their portfolio and how it shows their learning and what standards it shows, what they need to be cognizant of, why they're selecting what they are, and how it reflects what they're supposed to be learning, which is part number three, reflection. Once they make those choices, really being able to get gritty with why they chose it, what it shows, what goals were set that were met, or what challenges are still in play that they feel like this was either the beginning part. Because I used to say to kids, you know, it doesn't have to be your best work that shows up in the portfolio. It could just be stuff you're really proud of for one reason or another, and as long as you can articulate why you're why you've selected it, that's really what matters the most. And then the last part is connection. Not only what did I learn in this space, but how does it connect to learning that I'm doing in other spaces? And trying to get them to start doing that transfer piece, because in a perfect world, you're in a school that does portfolio, and it's not just in your class. So they can actually start to draw connections between their their learning in math class and science class, in English and in social studies. And, I mean, in a perfect world that isn't traditional, we actually have interdisciplinary learning going on, and maybe we don't have these concrete classes that are completely separated as they generally are right now. But maybe, you know, some kids are lucky enough to have workshop classes where these are already intermingling so that those ideas and connections are already happening. And then I think the best way to showcase learning then at that point is to have kids present on their final portfolio different parts of the year, maybe at the end of the year, and really have them speak to it. And if they don't like live in person presentations, you could have them make a video. You can have them do a screencast. You could have them do a podcast. I've had students do it all. And the best part about that for teachers is you're not gonna get bored when you're, you know, reading it over at the end because you're not gonna have a 100 different ones that are exactly the same because you gave them a checklist about things that needed to be in there and, you know, they were just looking to be compliant little robots or the opposite of what you were saying before.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And the and and the techniques really do work. Although, I will say something that you I I would love to hear your input on this is that we transitioned I I've always done portfolio systems in the past, but this year, we actually do have our entire ninth grade as a portfolio system. So it is cross curricular. But the the caveat is is that students have also been very much trained to not think of learning in this manner. It has been a very compliance based, like, oh, I turn this into the next day. Get either a 100% for doing it or a 0% for not doing it or something relatively similar to that. And it takes mean, we just now have students and it's been like two months, who are just now starting to really click it and get it and it's it's working really well for them. How do you go about, like, basically I hate to use the word training, but just kind of aligning the students' school process to understand what portfolios are and really transition them to this new system?

Speaker 2 So I had the dual challenge. When when I was in the classroom in that school, I was teaching mostly eleventh and twelfth graders. So these were kids who had gone through school already for so many years doing things a very different way than what I was asking them to do. So we had to sort of break their understanding first and then re you know, kind of mend it and really build in this conversation about, you know, what what are grades, what is the purpose of all of this, why is you know, why are we doing this? There was a lot of question of why, what do these things mean to us? So you kind of build it in right away. In that school that I was in, it was a portfolio school, so that was one of the few things they didn't need to sort of teach them about. They learn about it in sixth grade because we were six to 12, and so that part they always got, and it was just a question of reminder that, okay, we're doing this work. You're gonna save all your work. I would teach them how to label their files, how to separate them. And since we were also a journalism school, technology was a really big part of what we were doing. So they knew ultimately they were gonna be designing some kind of presentation, whether it was a website or, you know, a a prezi or, you know, some kind of movie movie at the end. And my my smarter, more organized students were doing it all along the way, sort of taking a little piece from this and a little piece from that. And in order to graduate at that school too, they needed to do an exit portfolio to be able to walk where they actually presented in front of a panel of their peers, teachers, and outsiders, and they had to align their presentations to what they were gonna be doing after school and how school kind of prepared them to do that. So that was an overarching philosophy of the school even though grades were still present in most of the places. And when I moved to other spaces, it just became an expectation like, alright. We're gonna be doing all this work. You're gonna be doing lots of revision. You're gonna be spending time with these pieces, so you're not gonna wanna throw them away right away. You're gonna wanna put them in a folder somewhere, label them, keep the drafts. Don't just keep revising and revising. Make copies so that you could see the progress, because I think part this is part of it as well, is making sure that students can see their own progress, not just us telling them, wow. You've grown so much. And if they could see the paragraph they started with in September and now they have a full essay by the beginning of October, and they could even see just in length and development where the changes have happened, that's a far more powerful experience for students to see their own progress than me just giving them a pat on the back and saying, you know, I've I've noticed great things. It's a lot more powerful if they could see it themselves.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah. And it's it's a really scary thing too for a teacher and maybe for a student as well to jump into an alternative style of learning or a different style of assessment because what you initially might get might not be very good because they're just not used to it. And I think it's important that we just give it time to fester and and give it time to really line up. That's a bell hooks thing, which is the idea of, like, a lot of progressive educators start progressive ideas and then they think that their class is going out of control because they're you know, some of that authoritarianism has been lifted and they have a tendency to double down and go back to how things used to be instead of really embracing it and see what happens over a really long period of time, like thirty,

Speaker 2 sixty, ninety days, or maybe even longer for some students. Well, I mean, I also kinda wanna mention, like, when I was writing hacking assessment, I didn't come up with the systems that were in place in that book in one school year. It took me years to figure out how to do things, and every time I did it, the same way I was asking kids to think about their own learning experiences, I was saying, like, okay. I could trim time off in this area if I do this. If I create a system to make sure that when I'm doing conferences with kids during class that cuts down on the transition time between when kids are coming up and when they're going down, like, just more smoothly that could happen. It took me a long time to figure out, alright. So I'm gonna send out a schedule ahead of class that time, and I'm also gonna put their names on the board when I get into class that period so that they know who's coming before and after them. And then when they get up, they're gonna cross their name off the board so the next person knows to come up without me having to say, okay. Next. They just see it happening. And then it was, well, if students are absent, how can I make sure that I don't fall behind? I'm gonna start using Boxer, and I'm gonna start using other platforms that are gonna help them interact with me in the time they're supposed to even if they're not physically here. And all of that happened, like, through trial and error, and you have to be patient like scientists or other field workers to kind of understand that you're not gonna find the right answer the first time you try. It's almost never gonna be right the first time. It could be in the right direction, but you're not gonna land on that, like, perfect answer the very first time you try things out with kids. It's gonna be messy, and it's gonna be it's gonna try your nerves because you're not gonna be comfortable with how messy it is. And the kids you got to invite the kids' feedback, and sometimes they're not gonna be kind, not as kind as you want them to be at least. And you just gotta, like, roll with it. You need to be as open to the feedback from them as you're expecting them to be with the feedback from you so that there really is this understanding that this is a partnership to make this learning space really theirs and to kinda share that together. So, I mean, anybody who hasn't done any of this yet, if you're in here hearing about this for the first time, be patient with yourself. Be patient with the kids. This is likely gonna be very new for everybody. So just you know, it it's gonna fail sometimes, and that doesn't mean it's failed altogether. It just means whatever you tried today needs to be reflected on and improved.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's also something to be said too about I know when I first started implementing these ideas, there was a conception amongst maybe other staff members or just online that if you transition to a model where students are the ones submitting things into their portfolio, that somehow you're lowering the bar as in the work that you're getting isn't gonna be as high quality. And I found to be honest that portfolio basis doesn't makes things actually much more difficult. The stuff that you're gonna get turned in likely is gonna be way better because of the amount of time and because of the expectations of growth over time as opposed to just being, like, repeat what I tell you to do and then just do it. There there's just so much more creativity. And as a result, I mean, creative work takes a lot of effort. It's it's very difficult to do. And you get some really good stuff. Again, I I welcome the the conversation to ask any questions so I don't just take all this time off with my own classrooms background. But I would love to hear more about the how when it comes to self assessment. So building into the second question here. How can we use self assessment to not only change our classroom for student well-being, but also for teacher well-being?

Speaker 2 So self assessment to me is the best way to really truly understand what a know a kid knows and can do. And you know what? It's not fair of us to expect that kids know how to do it automatically. It is something that needs to be taught. So I think it's really important, first of all, for teachers to model what that looks like and then to actually teach them a process to do it so they understand the expectations. But so much of the times, particularly with secondary teachers, we only see what kids allow us to see, and there's a lot that goes on in their head that's not terribly visible. So if we're gonna have a conversation about something and I really wanna understand what kids know and can do, I want them to have an opportunity to fill in the gaps that an assignment I ask them to do might not have given them a chance to show, and and this goes too for people who are still giving tests. If I design a test and leave out a whole bunch of material that because, you know, you have to choose what goes in and what comes out, what if kids have a really large knowledge base on the area that I didn't choose as important for that particular day, but they have a knowledge base that they could then share with me after the fact that gives me an opportunity to know that they took in way more than this assessment said they did. Chris, you had mentioned just a second ago about how creativity is a harder situation. Anytime that you ask a student to do a synthesis project or a collaborative project, there are multi tiers of what's going on. They have to first understand the lower level stuff, the comprehension stuff, then they need to be able to apply it, and then they need to turn it into something new. So if we're asking them to do that much with the content that we're working with on a regular basis and then they're sharing that knowledge with their classmates and peers through the different systems we set up in our spaces, then there are multiple opportunities for kids to learn things that aren't just coming from us or from textbooks or it's learning from the doing and then learning from each other's doing. And the self assessment piece is then this opportunity for kids to talk about, you know, what did I think I was supposed to do on this assignment? And that's particularly important because if we think we gave good directions on how things are supposed to be done, but they weren't as clear as we thought they were, and that happened to me a lot in the beginning, if I knew what kids thought they were supposed to do and then I assessed them based on that instead of my expectation. That was also a much clearer and fair assessment of of what they knew and could do. Because, I mean, if I was expecting them to do a, b, and c, and they did x, y, and z, but it's because they thought they were supposed to do x, y, and z. It wasn't because they didn't understand a, and c. They just didn't realize that's what needed to be done Sure. With this particular assignment. Yeah. You know, I always had them talk about what they thought they were supposed to be doing first. Yeah. I wanna invite in, Skyler here who had his hand raised in my Lama talk. And Okay. Also gonna plug in my MacBook because I don't have it plugged in, which is genius.

Speaker 1 So here you go, Skyler. You're up.

Speaker 3 Oh, sure. I also, submitted it in the q and a thing, so I wasn't sure how to do this. Hi, Star. Hi. I was curious as to how you were tracking drafts in a digital portfolio because I find that that's harder with students because they just wanna keep editing the same Google Doc. And I'm just curious, you know, if that was as simple as making having them make copies or if you were making copies to

Speaker 2 hold on to for them or or I'm just curious how that worked. So, I mean, there's a couple of ways you can do it. If you're using Google Docs, you could always use the his you know, track history so that you could just go into the history itself and then click on the earlier version so that if they forget to save those earlier drafts, you could just click on the early on the date due of the first one and then see what that looks like, and then click on the next one and and then come back up to the beginning. So it's never really lost if they don't share it Right. Like that way. But it's for for me, the best case scenario is having them make a copy each time, especially if you guys are using the Google educational suite. It's just a question of, you know, making a copy and then resaving it under a new name. So the first one becomes draft one, and then the second one that you make the copy of is draft two, and so on and so forth, and then it all just goes in together. But some kids aren't gonna do that, and the revision history is really a lifesaver in that regard. Got

Speaker 3 it. Thank you. No problem.

Speaker 1 Cool. Does anyone else have any questions surrounding self assessment or gradeless learning when it comes to the setup for their classroom, especially when it comes to if you're someone who maybe hasn't attempted this at all or doesn't know where to get started or has tried it and maybe it didn't work out or or anything of that nature? Because I think this would be a good time to kinda flush that out.

Speaker 2 So while you guys are thinking about it, I I had, like, a four or five step process that I used to do for reflection in class. First of all, if you start a project by inviting students to be a part of determining the success criteria, if you go through the assignment together and you ask them at the beginning, what do you think it takes to be successful? And then you guys determine success criteria based on the standards it's aligned with and the specific things that it's asking them to do, you're already starting out with a clear end point. Kids know what they're supposed to be doing, and they had some control over what that looked like before they even get started. And I think one of my rookie mistakes in the beginning was making the assumption that kids knew, and then they're shooting in the dark when they start. And then sometimes if we get to the end and it doesn't look anything like what you were expecting, that's partially because we didn't give them a finished target to look at. If you can do the project first to make sure you kind of walk yourself through the steps, that's always a really good idea, and it's fun. You'll be able to see where are kids gonna struggle, how can you build in some scaffolds if you yourself kind of struggled a little bit at certain times, what are the tips that you could kind of give different kids in class? Or if you see a kid doing something particularly well in class, how can you leverage that particular student to help other students in this space? So that's the first step, making sure that the success criteria is really, really, really clear and that when you're giving out an assignment, you're co constructing a rubric right at the get. It's also good if you have older kids who can articulate their understanding. If you could say to them, what do you think you need from me to be successful on this assignment? So, like, maybe there are gaps in learning where you'd need to do different mini lessons, and if kids could articulate that, maybe not in September, maybe not in October, but maybe starting in November and December, you'll have kids who could say, I don't know how to do that yet. That's something I need to learn, and then getting them to get comfortable with that. The next part is making sure on the reflection on the other end that they could talk to what they were supposed to do, that they could talk about their process for doing the projects, How did they go about doing it? What does the learning look like there? What did they struggle with? How did they overcome their struggles? The next part is probably to me for self assessment, the most important part and the part that most reflections will leave out is where does it align with the standards? What evidence from your learning actually supports your assessment of how well you've done? So if I'm telling you I was able to meet the criteria for, let's say I don't even know. Like, let's say it's to develop clear transitions between ideas, And I actually pull up a piece from a piece that I wrote, and I said between paragraphs three and four, you could see the developed transition to create cohesion, which aligns with this standard, and it's sort of giving them that argument development as well because they're sort of supporting themselves in that way. And then at the end, they're gonna tell you what they would have done differently Mhmm. And how they feel they've done with what the expectations of the assignment were and where they ended up falling at the end. And having all that information at the start gives you a much clearer lens through which to give them feedback. Because if you know they were working on a handful of things, those are the things you're gonna really target and the feedback you give them later.

Speaker 1 Awesome. Awesome. I I really appreciate the the clear guidelines. And Nick in the the q and a has a question a question that's kinda similar, which is he asked, what kinds of questions do you ask students in their evaluation, and do you have some kind of standard template that you go through in order to ask?

Speaker 2 So it's super simple. I I did have a poster that was hanging on my wall, and I know, Chris, you and I were talking before you have the self assessment book. You know the poster in there? It it's in a PDF in that one. So the bottom line is I ask kids to talk about their learning. It's like the visible learning questions. What did I learn? How did I learn it? How do I know I learned it? Really, really, really simple, but really potent if if they know how to answer those questions correctly. And it could be used on the micro level in terms of what you did in class that day to make sure that the learning happened as an exit ticket, or it could be at the end of a project where there were multiple objectives that they're really going back to that assignment sheet thinking about their learning. And I think the specific questions would vary from what the task was, you know, if it was a writing task, if it was a speaking task, if it was a creation task of some kind where they were developing something with technology. So depending on the skills we were looking to assess, the questions would then align with those expectations so that everything kinda yeah. Again, everything's really clear. You have your learning targets and you have your success criteria, and all the questions would then align with those two things.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I I I guess kind of moving in then into our almost like our second half here, the the last two questions, and then we'll have a lot of time for, like, debriefing, q and a, that kind of stuff. I'd love to leave as much time as possible there until 10:30. So we've kind of already alluded to this and we've already hinted at it. But how does all of this then build into student agency, voice and choice, etcetera? But then particularly, when it comes to student voice and agency, when it comes to self assessment, when it comes to gradeless learning, how does all that contribute to teacher well-being and teacher work life balance?

Speaker 2 As in, how has all of this changed your own relationship with the school and how much time you're spending at school and all that kind of stuff? Okay. So this is twofold, and you could go to either end of the spectrum. You're not gonna spend as much time planning per se. Like, when you're first writing a project, that might take a little bit of time. But I know that with the seniors I was working with, I actually started including them in project design as well where I would give them the objectives, and they would come up with projects. Like, you know, what do you kinda wanna do? And with older learners, I think you can really do that, kind of say, these are the things we need to get through. Here are your choices. What do you think? And more likely than not, they're gonna come up with stuff that you never even imagined possible, and that is really awesome when that happens. And I am thinking in one project in particular with Hamlet, which I had taught for years and years a certain way, and I kind of handed it off to all the kids, and they were in groups. I said, you know, this is my traditional unit. You have carte blanche to do whatever you want with it. Come up what you think would be the best, and then as a class, we'll vote on the group that came up with the best idea, and then I'll work with that group to develop the actual project and what the success criteria will be and what it will look like. And what the students came up with is brilliant. They made these movies psychoanalyzing individual characters, so they had to first do research on the text to find out about their character, and then they had to do research on psychological issues based on what they learned from the text. Like, for example, Gertrude were with with her narcissistic tendencies, so then they had to look up, you know, what it meant to be a narcissist and make sure that they could kind of align the text with the diagnosis, and then they had to create a movie about how they cured her. So there were these really and then we did a screening at the end where we looked at all the movies and the kids had to comment on each other's movies, and it was a lot of it was a lot of fun. Other projects we did were crazy satire movies where kids were making musicals, and I don't know. We had a lot of fun in class, needless to say. So, I mean, how did that help my balance and my interest in what was going on? I was not bringing home a hundred fifty ten page typed papers that I needed to grade, which were generally miserable to look at in the early days, just not terribly well written, not terribly interesting. And I'll take credit for why they were terrible I'm sure I wasn't doing such an awesome job teaching them how to do that to make it really interesting in the beginning. So there's that. I enjoyed the projects when they came in, and I didn't have to watch them alone. I could invite my son or my significant other to be a part of, you know, to be a part of that experience of what was going on. Also, in terms of work life balance on the other side, technology could could really be something that makes a balance more challenging than anything. I mean, you might not be planning as much, but my students knew at least five different ways to get in touch with me. If I didn't answer an email, I could get a direct message on Twitter, or they could reach me on Voxer, or they could text me, or they could do whatever because my newspaper kids in particular had my cell phone number. If we were at deadline and something came up and they needed to get me immediately, they always kind of had my phone number too. So learning when to say I'm not going to pick up the phone or I'm not going to answer that email or I'm not going to answer, you know, I'm not going to go into this to give more feedback, That that took me a little bit of time because I felt like if kids were working into the night and they wanted feedback, I I wanted to be as responsive as I could be without it being intrusive.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah. I know for me, it it transitioned a lot of the work into being more front loading. Mhmm. As kind of you said there with with projects, there's a lot of work at the beginning to make sure that everything's organized and that the the project's a cool idea and that you have something to present to students so that there's at least a starting point. So when you're, you know, you're co authoring your work, isn't just like, I have no idea what we're gonna do. It's just gonna be whatever. Because I found that to be very overwhelming when we did it that way. So there's at least an idea going in. But then after that, for me, I find myself working a lot more one on one with students at school, which means it's it's a lot more work than what I was doing. It's a lot harder to work one on one with students and give a lot of feedback that is to address all of them and go through, like, some kind of standardized curriculum with them. Because even though there's a lot of planning involved in that, there's not a lot of unique circumstances. It's just kind of like we're doing this and that's what it's gonna be seven, eight times in a row as opposed to being, you know, you're meeting with 40 kids and they're all have different circumstances. They all have different things to do. So it really just shifts kind of where the work lies and how much there is. So building into our final question here, we still have time for q and a. Do you have any other ideas for boosting teacher well-being beyond just a portfolio system or beyond just planning a project?

Speaker 2 I think it's really important, like I was starting to say before, about having very clear boundaries and front loading those as well. Like an office hours kind of idea, whether you're giving kids specific window of time you'll be available even if it's not physical office hours at school. Like, I will be answering your questions if you reach out to me between three and five, but after five is dinner time at home, and I am not gonna be like, just being very clear about your own parameters for helping kids, and obviously there'll be emergencies that might come up from time to time that you can address quickly, but I think it's really important that parents and students understand that you are not a twenty four hour business open for servicing their individual child's you know, their children's needs all the time. And people because I learned the hard way that when you do that, there becomes an expectation that you're going to do it all the time, and then it becomes exhausting, and then you don't want to do it at all. And so if you could be really clear on the front that these are my available times, When we're coming close to the end of a project, I might open up another window of time. These are the are the ways you can reach me that I will reach back. We used to do we tried doing extra help on Twitter one year where we had an hour with the class hashtag that we were using, where other kids could jump on and share resources and different people who may have seen it cycling through. Other teachers were really helpful too. I wasn't the only person who needed to be answering certain questions. So having a class hashtag so that kids could use each other as resources and building that into what's going on in class so that you're not the only resource. You really wanna give kids the tools and empower them to be the owners of their learning so that that takes the onus off of you as the only person in the space who has the authority to give that information out. So, like, if you're using Google Classroom, for example, which I didn't use because it wasn't out yet when I was doing most of this, it was just starting to be. When you're using Google Classroom, you could just post resources. If a bunch of kids are asking you, up it goes for everybody, and then it's there, and you don't have to worry about it. And then they could carry on their conversation in the Google classroom if you're not gonna use a clash has class hashtag on on Twitter or somewhere else.

Speaker 1 Yeah. There yeah. I mean, there's a there's a systemic component there as well, which is, like, thinking about how much homework is being assigned if any at all or how much we're expecting students to do outside the classroom. Mhmm. Because if we're, I mean, if we're not assigning homework and we're giving ample amounts of time at school to work on things and we're not really expecting at least most of the time for students to be doing things at home, then it kind of lends itself to thinking, well, then there should be more boundaries between a student needing extra help after school. I'm not saying that teachers shouldn't help people after school at all. But if you're assigning a ton of homework every single day, of course, you're going to expect that there's going to be more students asking questions long into the night as they're working on your stuff. So the way that you're designing and developing your classrooms

Speaker 2 norms also are going to lend itself to how that communication unfolds and how it takes place. I would recommend not like, if you're gonna be doing project based learning as the main mode of what's going on in your space, additional homework is not going to be necessary. If they're really buying into the projects that you're doing, they're gonna wanna take it home and do work and work with their groups because you only have a limited of time that you have during the class period. I opened my classroom up for lunchtimes, like kids were always in my classroom either working on their blogs, working in groups if they couldn't meet at other times outside of school. Like, I made my space available. I'm an early riser, so I would get to school early. They could come to school early, but in the afternoons I knew I couldn't stick around because I had a young child I had to pick up. So it was sort of like knowing your schedule and then sort of finding ways to make it work for them and then again setting those boundaries in certain spaces. Training training the kids to also help each other is a big a big part of it. That's another thing that we can't assume they know how to do. We actually need to teach them to do it. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm I'm with that takes a very long time.

Speaker 1 And I learned in my own practice, you to be very explicit about the fact that you're trying to teach it as well. Like, when we first started doing that kind of stuff, we had, a lot of activities that were based around, like, giving good critique or helping each other evaluate each other's work and helping each other. But it's turned more into, like, we're gonna spend fifteen minutes of giving each other feedback. Here's what it looks like modeling it, showing a video about it. Mhmm. And doing that way more often than you'd think you would need to do it. Like, we're at the point where it's like once a week at least of explicitly saying this is exactly how you do it. That's something that I've always struggled with personally, which is repeating things over and over again because I'm used to talking about all the time. So I just assume that everybody knows that if we do this once, then it's like, okay. Here's what you should be doing. But it's not like that, especially when you're, you know, 13, 14, 15 years old. You need a lot of repetition in order to really understand what it is that, you know, that the teacher is looking for and, you know, what it is that we're we're trying to promote kids to do. So I have a quick hack that you could do over time.

Speaker 2 You could have kids create a library of videos that you keep on your website of these different things that you are repeating over and over and over and over again so that it's kid voice in this one area. Hey. You wanna know how to give feedback on Socratic seminar questions or you wanna give feedback on somebody's projects. Like, when you have some kids who are super good at doing it, and either you just get a quick recording of it happening in school and then using it as a tutorial, you ask a kid who's particularly tech savvy if they want to do that, not because they're going be getting extra credit for it because that's going to be the inclination to ask for extra credit, but they're doing it because this is going to be a resource that's going to help them and other students in the future. And then you have a go to library. So instead of having to repeat yourself a million times, you could just say, hey. Check out the playlist that we have on this kind of topic on either a private YouTube channel that you set up for them or a spot on your website. And as much as that sounds a lot of work for for those folks on here who may or may not be a tech savvy kind of individual, it's it's really easy. And once you set it up kind of on the front end, adding stuff to it is super easy too, especially if you're only adding one or two things at a time. So that's a that's a quick fix for having some resources that you develop over time, and then, you know, three or four years in, you actually have a robust library of kid generated work.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah. That's a that's a really that's a that's a fantastic point. I'm with you a 100% on that. And I think that with our remaining time here of, like, fifteen minutes or so, I encourage anyone to ask any specific questions that they have surrounding how to do any of these things while you're you're typing a response or raising your hand or whatever it is that you wanna do. I just wanna share a quick story about this as I it's super relevant because it happened, like, last week and why I love this stuff so much, which is I've had I have two learners in my class who, to be honest, haven't haven't done much for the last two months. There's been a lot of we have actually like a PBL block. Nice. So we have a project based time where students are working on mostly just their passions and pursuits. And these two learners, it's gonna sound really bad, but really, I mean, when I say they haven't done anything in two months, I mean that quite literally. There there really hasn't been much there. And as, Kathy is kind of alluding to into the chat about the that that fear or the the ego of the teacher. Like, there's that part of me that's just like, I just wanna tell them, like, you're gonna do this and here's what it is and you're just gonna repeat this because this is what I'm telling you to do and this is inappropriate for what you're doing right now. And it's just been a lot of conversations about like, you know, what do you want to do? Do you enjoy doing this kind of thing? Probably every other day for literally sixty days. And as of the last week, we finally figured out that these students really like to make video games. They really like playing video games. And we introduced them to a project that we actually did last year surrounding video games. It meets pretty much standards across the board. It's like writing, reading, research, all sorts of kinds of things. And we gave them the software. And it's gotten to the point now where these students are working on this game so much that they were staying after school for an hour every single day and just, like, hyper focused on it. And these were students that were labeled by other teachers as being like low or being, you know Lazy or Yeah. Just like not good not good students. Mhmm. And it's amazing once we built that relationship and we made that connection, like how much is getting done and how quickly it's getting done to the point where they're they're working on it so much that they're actually surpassing what some people have done over two months just because of how focused they are and they're using their time wisely. So again, I just wanna reiterate the fact that it takes a lot of time and you can't give up on it. I mean, it's taken some people in my room more than a year, like beyond my actual classroom to get to that point. But I guarantee that there will be a result at some point because people intrinsically do want to learn. That just has to be restored to them. And it takes some others a lot of deprogramming time. I'm gonna toss it over to Eric here who is going to talk. Oh, Eric, you're using an older version of Zoom. So apparently, you're gonna be a panelist here. That's what it just told me. So, you're a panelist now. Welcome. Hello, Eric. And you're here. There you go. Hello, Eric. Hey. How's it going, guys? Good. How are you? Good.

Speaker 4 So I'm AP lit teacher. I have three sections of AP lit. And as much as I try not to focus on the AP exam, There is that multiple choice component of the AP exam. I know you you said earlier you taught AP lit Mhmm. And that you threw out tests. Do you have any suggestions or ideas for someone in my position who I'm trying to prepare kids for the AP exam. They care about it enough, that I feel like I have some obligation to, but at the same time, giving them choice in that or using self reflection to help them in their multiple choice practice.

Speaker 2 Okay. So I have a couple of suggestions. For one, don't use class time for it. Maybe do a lunch and learn where you have study groups come in and you do some timed targeted practice where maybe you do one reading excerpt and, you know, the five to seven questions that come with it, and then just focus on that, and then really do a breakdown after you time it and you do it of what the questions are asking, what kind of answers they generally come up with, because there is a formula. So if they understand how the questions go, how they should dig through context, how they shouldn't skip certain things when they're reading, and working on those specific strategies, and let's say you do, like, maybe one lunch and learn or two lunch and learns a month up until, like, February, and then come February when you're getting closer to the exam in May, maybe you start offering one weekly and then maybe the week before every single day, and then kids who want to come every day can, and kids who don't don't have to, and you can also set it up where you're asking them to write questions for each other based on the same text so that they're going to understand the structure of the questions, and they also become better question askers of themselves. Personally, I think and I'm sorry if I offend anyone in here I think it's a shitty test, and most of the time as somebody with a degree in English, I never once took a multiple choice test on any kind of literature in my entire degree and my master's degree or my other like, multiple choice tests is just a really crappy way to assess literature understanding. So college board folks, if you're listening out there, maybe it's time to I petitioned them for two years to accept my students' research papers as a legitimate alternative to their crappy test. But I was like, we'll pay for it. We'll pay for readers. You'll get your $90. Don't even worry about it. But, you know, they just they have a way, and it's a standardized way, but it's crappy. It's real crappy. And I didn't wanna waste class time making kids feel horrible about themselves because they couldn't answer those questions. So, like, the writing, you're like, my kids were always hyper prepared for the writing because we did so much writing in class. Right. But those questions, like I said, just short timed lunch and learn situations where they understand the questions, how they could tackle what's actually being asked, giving them strategies for going back to the text with highlighters, making sure they understand the trick parts of what's going on in there, and then asking them to write their own the same way so that they've really dissected it in a way that's gonna make them feel really confident when they're in there.

Speaker 4 Great. Thank you. You're welcome.

Speaker 1 That's a a real a really good point as well is that, what's what's really interesting to note is that I mean, there's a reason why upper middle class to wealthy students who go to, like, s a d SAT camps or ACT camps and out of nowhere, they do amazingly well on tests, even though they might have not actually learned the information that's being tested. Something that actually helped me and it's I I hate doing this because it's so anti the things that I believe in. But I actually went to one of those SAT, like, after school sessions sessions just to see what they do. And right before we take those kind of tests, we just go over the exact same methods. And we did see test scores go up. So even though we don't necessarily care about the test scores, there is still that underlying threat of you do bad on the test, then, you know, someone's gonna come after you. And something that's really helped us a lot to realize is that it's not even necessarily even about the content. It's about just understanding how to answer a question.

Speaker 2 Yep. And I for me, with those exams, like, I'm a literature I'm like a writing nerd. Like, I enjoy these things in such a way that it's so upsetting to me that they get bastardized by these tests in a way that they take the most obscure excerpt, especially with the AP Lit exam. They take the most obscure excerpt from some seventeenth or eighteenth century British text that is already completely inaccessible to most people even if they had the entire context, and then they ask these really hyper obscure questions that even really smart people who have studied literature for a long time could potentially get wrong. So I just I I really struggle with the idea of having right and wrong answers when it pertains to literature because we want to go deeper than just content comprehension kind of questions. And if we're going to be going with inferential questions, then the kinds of answers that you could put into a multiple choice question to me are just limiting. Yeah. And that's not the way we want readers to read. We want them to be able to feel feel and understand a full spectrum of of certain things when they when they behave as good readers. So, again, college board, rethink your process.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the the revolutionary side of me wants to say, because we we do this as well, is sending home a lot of literature around test time about the just the the poor nature of how tests are designed. Not to, like, soften the blow per se, but just to ensure that, you know, students who really get a lot of anxiety or parents who get a lot of anxiety about their students getting low scores don't freak out if they get low scores. And that at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter too much. A lot of our work has been in just showing that if you wanna go to college, you're gonna get into college. Mhmm. Yes. You might not get into Yale or Harvard,

Speaker 2 but most state schools take almost a 100% of students. They don't care about your ACT or SAT score. There's some way that you're gonna get in there, because, frankly, the college wants your money. A lot of schools too don't do that anymore. Like, Dartmouth threw out the SATs as a part of their process a long time ago as well as a lot of other IVs have done so. And I think along the lines of the grade list classroom, like to tie this all back to that, one of the major reasons most teachers come to me and say, can't do this because kids want to go to college, and what about the transcripts? The bottom line is homeschool kids are there are more kids homeschooled now than there ever have been before, and those students go to college without transcripts. I don't want to burst anybody's bubble here, but they're going without the same curriculum your kids are learning in school, and they're going without a regular traditional high school transcript. So it can happen. What needs to happen is that those barriers that are keeping more kids out need to be lowered for every kid, so there there's a real equity challenge here too in a lot of ways. And what we really want to do is give every child because we've all been to college on this, you know, on this summit right now. We've all been there, and college is largely what you put into it. So if I went to a SUNY school, the New York State state, you know, public colleges, then and I decided I was gonna be the kind of student who really gave it my all and kind of went in and got the extra help and took more classes than I needed to, then I'm gonna get a lot out of my degree. Yeah. Or I could have been the kind of person who did just enough to get by, and at the end of it at the end of the day, I don't know how many of my employers actually looked at my degree to see that I graduated with honors or what the specific I mean, I did that for me because I'm a nerd and I'm happy. Like, I just want to take it all in, and I've always been like that. But at the same time, it it doesn't make you any less marketable if you graduated from a different place and didn't get, you know,

Speaker 1 all a's. And for the record, schools like Harvard don't even grieve once you get in there. Don't think. I think it's past fail now. So Yeah. I mean, this kind of stuff riles me up, and I won't take too much time here. I'll get through there are, two more questions here. But there's something to be said about the fact that college students are more and more purposeless. And what the hell was the point of going to college and beating all of these test scores if you actually don't care about the things that you're doing? That's like a excellent sheet by William Dureshowitz, which is this that concept of, yeah, you got all a's on everything. Yeah. You met all the benchmarks, but you don't actually care about what you're doing. And then ultimately know anything either because fifteen minutes after you took the test, you just made space for the next useless information that you needed for the next test. Yeah. Horrible. Yeah. So let's dive into we got we got two more really quick. I'll try to make these these super short. So first, we have, Jeff Wells who writes, that his students tend to be very myopic about only applying to big universities in Ontario. And there's there's a deeper mindset that has to change surrounding that. So do you have any thoughts on how we can change student parent, you know, culturally, the mindset that the big universities are all that really matters?

Speaker 2 Exposure? I mean, I don't know if you have the opportunity to take kids on trips to different places and not just in the year they're applying, maybe years before. Start bringing them as soon as they get into that. I know in Canada, they have, like, the the academic sort of track that happens, and they start to segregate the kids by ninth grade, I think. Correct me if I'm wrong. So, you know, at that point, I would start exposing them, making it a point to bring them to symposiums on college campuses that they have, you know, let them take college visits, talk to college students, visit with college advisors. If you can't get them to those other places, bring guest speakers in from those colleges to talk about them and give presentations on it so that they have the opportunity have that exposure and a little bit more understanding about the differences and what the benefits might be to be in a smaller space and having that more individualized sort of attention than they'd get in one of those larger institutions.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And just the the choice that's out there. Like, I wish I would have known then what I know now about schools and that fact that there are all these schools pretty much everywhere that have really cool progressive settings that are just way more focused on things that you want to do as opposed to what they want to do. And typically that isn't the large state school. No offense to OSU, but my undergrad was really boring. I mean, all I ever did was just go to lectures and answer questions. But if I would have gone an hour west to, like, Antioch, anyone's familiar with Antioch, that's a hyper progressive school. But all they do is just go on trips and they talk about stuff and they they have everything's hands on. It's all grade list. Just how much different that experience would have been for roughly the same amount of money once you factor in the fact that private schools tend to give more scholarships, especially for those that have portfolios. A lot of progressive schools grade based on portfolios or assessed based on portfolios. So lastly here, to wrap things up, one more thing which is from Nick Covington. So Nick, you're on.

Speaker 5 Okay. Hey. How's it going, Star? It's going great. Thanks. Great. So I was just thinking about this earlier in the chat. We were talking about, you know, we were talking about AP testing, and Eric brought up that question. I thought your response was great. And and maybe it hasn't been a topic that come has come up so far, but I've really seen it in my own grade list practice. But how would you maybe characterize that issue of student anxiety, right, and kind of their anxiety about school, their anxiety about maybe AP testing and and those kinds of things? Because I know I could speak to that on my end. I've talked to Chris about that too. But how would you characterize students' attitudes and, like, what have you seen happen to anxiety in your classroom since you've made these changes? Thank you.

Speaker 2 So you know that when you're working with kids who are in that honors track, AP kids, you're dealing with the most anxious, and their grades matter so much to them. So you're for me in my school, I spent a lot of time breaking breaking that expectation that an a is what defines them as a learner. It was more about their experience, more about that deep understanding. And I had a lot of super anxious kids. To be honest with you, I have a son who's in ninth grade who is also very anxious and a high achiever, and he goes to a very traditional school. I'm not sure if you guys saw my most recent rant on Twitter over what is going on in my son's school and me being a parent about like, I it's so hard for me to sit on my dissatisfaction of how they are educating my child that I can't afford to send him to a private school that does like, it I feel like progressive schools shouldn't only be private schools that cost $30,000 a year extra so that your kid could get exactly what they need. And my son's been anxious probably since the fourth grade. They start testing in New York in third grade, so there's no small correlation there that his anxiety about learning happens a year after he started taking the tests. And there was such a huge push for him to be filling out packets, and and he did well on all of them. He was rating fours on all of them, but by fifth grade, we stopped making him take it because the amount of pushback we were getting at home was just miserable. And I think that when you take away grades and you take away competition in the classroom and you make it a collaborative, cooperative effort, that that anxiety drastically decreases, especially when you remind kids that doing that deep level work is far more engaging, and it works better. So at the end of the day, if we have to put a grade on the report card, they're contributing to that conversation, and as long as they are doing the learning every single day, they don't have to worry about the work on the on the back end. And in terms of the AP exams, you know, I I kind of always had conversations with my students about how these exams kind of what you were saying before, Chris, like, to soften the blow, but these exams don't define their intelligence in any way, shape, or form. Teachers aren't writing those tests. Outsider parties who have determined what's important are, and they don't always share that information with us. And if it was all about getting a five on the AP exam, we'd do nothing fun in this class all year long because all you would be doing is reading, you know, the worst excerpts of Jonathan Swift, and you would be answering questions about syntax that nobody cares about ever. Even even if you love Jonathan Swift, and I do, but, you know, it it it never seems to do it justice. So I think we have to think about the social emotional aspect of everything that we do, and giving taking the grades out of the equation, I think, really does treat kids with dignity, and it creates an opportunity for kids to really feel like we value their voice

Speaker 1 and not just what they're gonna get as a defining point, if that makes any sense. Oh, yeah. For sure. I mean, at the end of the day, if you're killing the student's motivation to learn, it doesn't matter what you're covering. You could you could be covering whatever you want, but if they're not motivated, then none of that is gonna get communicated regardless. So the focus should be on motivation and interest first, content second. The content will automatically come as students motivated and interested in it. So it all just adds up. So, Star, thank you again for joining us, giving up your time. I think this has been really, beneficial. I've enjoyed the conversation. If anyone wants to send a message, HRP is always open to messages via Twitter or wherever you can find us on our website. And I I think this has gone really well. A recording will be made available on, our YouTube page here in a bit as well as via our podcast, which links will go up on across all of our different social media pages. And feel free to ask any follow-up questions as you see fit.

Speaker 2 So, yeah, thanks again. Thanks. And if you guys ever have questions for me or you're starting this crazy process and you haven't checked out hacking assessment, there's lots of free stuff on my blog. If you don't wanna buy a book, that's totally cool too. And I'm always open to open like, if if you ask me a question on Twitter, I'm pretty good about getting back to folks. So

Speaker 3 just just reach out.

Speaker 1 Cool. Awesome, folks. Thanks again for joining us, we'll talk again soon.

Speaker 2 Bye bye.