Wanna Know If Students Are Learning? Ask Them These 4 Questions

It can be a struggle to best help students understand what they are learning or for students to articulate their learning in meaningful ways. This was especially difficult for me starting out in on my teaching journey. Based on how I had been taught to be an educator the best ways to know if students are learning was to give them a test. If they failed, it was their fault and they needed to do better next time. It took me a long time to learn that in the process of learning the teacher and the student need to be partners.

Research backs this up.

Much of the research around determining the best instructional strategies to use in the classroom center around learning processes and metacognition. It isn't the tools or technology that students use in learning that have the most profound impact. What really makes a difference is how well students understand what they are learning that day, how they can put that learning into their own words and how they can make connections to previous and next learning events.

Understanding if students are learning isn't difficult and doesn't take away time from actual instruction. In fact there are 4 simple questions students can ask (and the teacher to understand) to know if learning is actually taking place.

What am I learning? Before the lesson even starts students need to know what they are learning, but more importantly, how what they learn connects to something they’ve already learned. It is common practice in many classrooms to write objectives or standards on the board. When I was in the classroom it was an expectation handed down from district leadership that the objectives to be covered that day were to be on the board. If they weren't you could be reprimanded.

There's one problem with this approach. Standards and objectives are written for educators, not students. Their wording is often confusing and it can be difficult for students to make the necessary connections when reading them. Students should be able to understand and distill what they are learning in their own words and make their own meaning. Teachers have to drive this understanding through clarity.

Teacher clarity aims to narrow the focus of learning. By focusing on the most critical parts of instruction (learning intentions, success criteria and learning progressions) students can better understand what they are learning and more importantly, why. The research into Teacher Clarity shows that, when used consistently and accurately it can have an effect size of 0.75, nearly doubling the rates of student achievement.

How will I know I've been successful? Often it is a mystery to students to know how they will be successful in their current learning endeavor. Typically, they’ve seen pop quizzes or even know there will be a test at the end of the week. Success criteria goes deeper. It isn't just students knowing what they will learn and how they know they have learned it. It's also the processes by which students will get there. Therefore Success Criteria has both a product focus but also a process focus as well.

Shirley Clark, an expert in formative assessment says that defining process success does six things for students:

• Ensure appropriate focus
• Provide opportunity to clarify their understanding
• Identify success for themselves
• Begin to identify where the difficulties lie
• Discuss how they will improve
• Monitor their own progress

For maximum impact Clark explains that Success Criteria:

• Need to be known and shared
• Should be the same for all learners (differentiation happens with the activity, rather than the success criteria)
• Can be used across the curriculum
• Need to be referred to constantly by students

What is my next learning step? As part of the overall lesson, we need to not only focus on the before and during but the after as well. Students should know where on their overall learning path they are and where they are going next. This gives them the opportunity to foreshadow and draw conclusions as to where they are in this learning moment and how that will lead them to the next. This is a critical step for them to make the necessary connections to content to make learning visible.

How would I communicate what I've learned to others? Often times the communication of what we have learned is not even a part of the overall learning journey or is only a part of a special project or unit. But take a step back. How do we learn anything? Before the invention of the printing press learning was shared through stories and spoken word. Books were only for the wealthy. Therefore learning was very limited. After the printing press books became more widespread. Now we have even faster, more far reaching means of communication, such as social media to learn and grow.

Students need to not only understand but to participate in communicating their learning with others, beyond their desk and the walls of their classroom. That communication can come in a variety of forms like blog posts, websites, podcasts, videos, etc. The medium is dependent on what students are sharing. The bottom line is that one of the most powerful ways for the teacher and the students solidify what they know and how they know it is to be able to communicate that learning to someone else. Quizzes or exams are great for snapshots but to truly be able to distill their learning, students need to communicate that learning to others.

3 Ways To Combat Recipe Learning

When I was a middle school science teacher I regularly assigned projects. At the time I thought that the projects would be a great way for me to understand what my students understood about particular concepts and topics. I had them make visual representations of atoms of the periodic table, reports outlining the effects of global warming on our community, and several others. We would regularly complete labs in class and then I would have them report their findings to present, just as scientists do.

The way I learned how to assign these projects what was from my teacher preparation program. Through trial and error I learned how to give these projects and grade them effectively for understanding. Rubrics were all the rage so I thought that by giving all the same project and using the rubric I was differentiating for my students because they got to decide where they fit on the rubric. What I didn’t know at the time was I was expecting all the same level of work.

I hadn’t designed an effective summative assessment.

I had assigned a recipe.

I enjoy to cook and spend a lot of time doing it when I’m not traveling. Recipes help me complete complex tasks that, I hope, in the end help my dishes look as great as the pictures on the recipe card. If you’ve ever watched a competition cooking show they give the contestants recipes to follow and then judge them how well they match up against their expectations.

Isn’t that what I was doing in my classroom?

Sure. I was giving them a project, telling them all my expectations for what to produce, and of course every kid needed to produce the same thing because that made it easier for me to grade. And, I thought it would easily show me what they had learned. In the end I got 30 of the same element, 30 of the same reports and 30 of the same presentations. What I thought was good for my students actually wasn’t. I had given them a recipe and they had followed but were they really able to tell me what they’d learned? Was I letting them be creative in the process, thereby giving them a reason to invest in their learning?

Certainly not.

We’ve all been guilty of the recipe approach. Either as an unwilling participant or a willing assigner of these types of assignments and projects. The push back I get is, yeah but kids want recipes. They want to be told the expectations. They want to have the guidelines. That may be only slightly true. If I were to sit down with a group of students and give them 2 options, one to produce a highly scripted, outlined project, or one where the expectations are set out but they get to decide what they want to produce, I’d be willing to bet they’d pick the freedom to create whatever they want every time. All they know in school is the scripted approach. So they’ve come to rely on it. We have to help break free of that mantra and allow creativity and innovation into the work students do.

3 Ways To Combat Recipes Learning

Choice In Content, Process and/or Product- Allowing students to discover their own paths to content and process and products helps invest them in their learning. While content may be set by standards or expected outcomes, students can get creative in how they learn that content, the methods by which they connect that content to already known knowledge and especially in how they demonstrate their understanding.

Choice can also come from the types of technologies student use. There are all sorts of ways from students using tablets to create videos and audio podcasts, to building or replicating historical events in Minecraft, to using drawing and spreadsheet tools to create infographics. Any of these can be choices that students make to discover content in a new way, tools that they use to make a better understanding of their learning or how they can produce a result to demonstrate their learning.

There are all sorts of ways for students to show off their creativity by fostering choice with content, process and product.

Move To Problem Based Learning- You are a member of a team tasked with investigating the impact of the removal of a local park in favor of building a new high school football stadium. The high school has never had a stadium and really wants one. But the neighborhood uses the park daily and it would be a great loss to the community. There is also a stream that runs through the park that would be impacted. The task is to present a recommendation to the Mayor as to what should be done.

To move past the boring recipe type projects and expected outcomes, look to Problem Based Learning. PBL gives real-world problems for students to solve. The example above is one from a school in my district that was an actual problem faced by the students and the surrounding community. For the entire school year the school worked on the problem in all the classes, tied to curriculum and standards. At the end of the year many student teams presented their findings to the Mayor. The solutions they came up with were vast, but none the same. Each team was able to show off their creativity and innovative ideas to solve the problem.

As we know many problems have multiple solutions. So the scripted approach to what students will produce won’t really work here. Students, utilizing choice, can investigate, research, hypothesize, test and report on how they would solve the problem. The Buck Institute for Education is the go-to for anything PBL. Check out their resource section for example problems, assessment ideas and project guides.

Embrace Formative Assessment- Formative assessments are short and quick assessments that are given at the moment of learning. They can be a simple temperature check, having students explain their learning in their own words, or something more detailed, such as having them answer a few math problems or complete a task related to learning. The key is they are done at the moment of learning. They don’t wait for all the learning to be complete and then are given. Summative assessments, like the test at the end of the chapter or the recipe final project given at the end of the year, do serve their purpose if used effectively but formative assessments can help drive teaching and learning.

If the end goal of the recipe project is to see what students have learned and for them to demonstrate that learning, why wait until the end of the learning? By asking pointed and simple questions throughout the learning process teachers and students have a greater understanding of both how effective the teaching is and how the learning is progressing. Then there is little need for that scripted, recipe project and more time can be taken for deeper understanding and differentiation. Formative assessments come in all forms. Check out this post I wrote recently about them and how they can be used and different ways technology can help.


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Learning Beyond The Classroom Walls

When I decided to pursue a Master’s Degree in Instructional Technology, I started out like many students do. I sat down at my laptop, went to Google and started searching. Eventually I landed on a program at an in-state university that was one of the first of its kind. Everything was virtual. Not once in the 18 months I was in the program would I set foot on campus. I completed everything from the comfort of my home or the road.

Just a few years ago, programs like the one I completed were very few and far between. There have been correspondence courses for a number of years but these normally led to certificates and rarely led to actual degrees. Today, students of all ages have virtually an unlimited number of options to not only obtain degrees in any number of subjects, but to learn from some of the leading thinkers and doers around.

Take online degrees like the one I got. More and more traditional colleges and universities are providing these as an option for both traditional and nontraditional, working students. Many students can now obtain full degrees, from bachelor’s to PhD, all from a laptop in their living room, rather than a stuffy classroom in a building named for someone few remember. This idea of anytime learning extends far beyond K-12 and has far-reaching effects in higher education as well.

Traditional colleges and universities are also facing a new generation of learning options through MOOCs. Massively Open Online Courses are just that - virtual classes on many topics where you might be in a class with your neighbor or someone from Sub-Saharan Africa. These courses touch all continents, and in many cases are taught by the same professors and educators who are teaching them in prestigious colleges and universities around the world. And, in the case of courses offered by colleges and universities, they are free to take. Who wouldn’t want to learn about Economics or Physics from leaders in the field, for free?

Where can you discover some of these innovative courses?

Lifehacker U-This is the first site I visit when I want to see what’s new in the world of virtual learning. The folks over at Lifehacker put together some pretty comprehensive lists of free courses on a wide variety of topics, including Computer Science, Astrophysics, Dinosaur Paleobiology or The Importance of Play In Everyday Life. There’s course for almost anyone!

Keep in mind there are a few things to consider before enrolling in online courses, so do your homework. You might want to consider what the course outcome will be, if the courses lead to degree or certification, or if there is additional course work you’ll need that isn’t offered online.

It’s not easy to convert a face-to-face course into a virtual experience. So make sure you also research whether the professors and educators leading the course are certified to teach online. It doesn't hurt to ask if you can sample the course to ensure it will meet your needs, too.

Online and virtual courses are certainly a convenient way to engage in learning, whether it’s to further your education or just to learn something new. Just be sure to find the one that’s right for your needs.

Happy learning!

Disclosure: This post was written as part of the University of Phoenix Versus Program. I’m a compensated contributor, but the thoughts and ideas are my own.

Quick List of Apps For Learners And Curators

When it comes to mobile learning there are loads of great sites for apps for kids and teachers. Everything from apps organized by Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy to apps organized by grade level and subject area. It can be daunting to sort through all those apps to find the special ones for learning something new or curating information. 

What are they? Well my friend, here are my Top 10 Apps For Learners and Curators

(All of these are for iPad but you can find many, or an equivalent, in the Android Market as well)

1) Google Drive-Where would I be without Google Drive and Google Docs? Lost I am sure. My life is spent editing and creating documents, presentations and spreadsheets. And the ability to share those easily makes Google Docs my go-to app for editing, not only at the computer but on the go as well. I can edit, comment and view all my documents from this app, no matter where I am.

2) Dropbox-For those items I can’t keep in Google Docs, I use Dropbox. The app gives you access to all your files stored in the cloud so you can retrieve them, email them, view them, and show them, again, no matter where you are.

3) Adobe Ideas- You never know when a great idea is going to strike. Adobe Ideas is always at the ready to capture a drawing, sketch, list or what ever you need.

4) Pocket-I am a huge, huge fan of this app. Whenever you are reading a blog or come across a webpage that you just don’t have time to check out or don’t want to save it to your booksmarks before you have a chance to look at it, you can Pocket. Adding items to your list is easy as a checkmark in the address bar and the app gives you online and offline access to your entire list.

5) Diigo-Once you read all those saves in your pocket app, you need a way to curate them and retrieve them later. Diigo is that tool. Add to your library, tag and save. You can do everything from the app. Oh and you get the highlighter and clipping functions too. I use this one a lot from my tablets simply because I can curate anywhere I happen to be. 

6) Google Hangouts-I like having an office, because I can duck in there and shut the door and get some work done. But let's face it, out in the world is where we should be. Google Hangouts lets me untether myself from my office and have a meeting, learning session or just conversation anywhere. The ability to video chat with up to 9 other folks is a big advantage and we can document share, desktop share and more. The best part? I am mobile so I can do it from anywhere and still take part in the learning!

7) Zite-This is a Social Aggregator that takes topics you decide and pulls the most relevant stories related to those topics. They are then presenting and a pretty neat magazine format. And you can share what you read via Twitter, Facebook and email. So you can keep up with topics in education and share them with ease.

8) Google Translate-In many of our schools English might not be the main language spoken. The Google Translate app is great for helping to break the language barrier with students and staff and you can put in text and get instant translations for emails and documents. And, you might just be able to teach yourself too. 

9) TED-These are inspiring talks given from some of the brightest minds on the planet. This app gives you access to the entire directory. You can use the TED talks build morale and challenge the thinking of your staff and students.

10) Dragon Dictation-Let’s face it, sometimes typing on the iPad can be challenging. Dragon Dictation does it all for you. Using the built-in mic you can dictate memos, documents, blog posts and more.

There are loads more apps out there for all different sorts of uses. Check out this post to learn more about how you can get more mileage out of your mobile learning device. 

What are your favorite apps for learning and curating. Leave some suggestions in the comments below!

photo credit: Kalexanderson via photopin cc

Only Learning Halfway

Back in March I had the chance to sit in and learn with David Warlick. I had heard David speak but not present. So this was a great opportunity for me to learn from and with one of the people I admire most in the education world. I sat in on 2 of his sessions, one on data visualization and the other on social media conversations. They were both very fascinating conversations where he demonstrated some pretty powerful tools. But it wasn't the heart of his presentations that really spoke to me. It was how he started them.

He began one session by showing a video. (One that for the life of me I can not find so you will have do with my description.If you know what video I am talking about please, leave me a link.) The video was an animation of a machine making a robot (cyborg). When she comes to life she is confused yet aware of what she is, much to the displeasure of the creator. She shouldn't be saying or doing the things she is. She must be broken. He begins to tear her down saying it is for her own good. She tries to fight and convince the creator she will obey and follow. He puts her back together and the story ends. I am probably not explaining it correctly but it was a terribly dark scene that gave me lots to think about.

David made the connection back to the session but it was what he said that's the point of this post. He said he always starts out is talks and presentations by showing something he learned yesterday. Sometimes they connect, and sometimes they don't. But what really resonated with me is the public and open reflection of his learning.

What a great idea!

Right after that session I saw this great piece on why everyone should dedicate 30 minutes to learn something you are passionate about everyday. Not only does it feel good to learn something new but it makes you smarter too. The piece has some great suggestions on how to take the time and what to do with it.

These two things have really left me thinking and reflecting personally. What do I do everyday to learn? How am I sharing that learning with others? I hear educators everyday that say they want to instill the value of lifelong learning in their students and they want to be lifelong learner themselves. I think to some extent we are all learning everyday. But I think sometimes we only learn half way.

If we take in knowledge are we truly learning? I think maybe only in the simplest form possible. But if we don't share what we are learning, how can we grow? How can we help others grow?

So my challenge to you is don't learn half way. Take the 30 minutes everyday to learn something new and be like David, share that learning with the world.


photo credit: Pragmagraphr via photopin cc

Learning Should Be Messy....Right?

I was at a school recently. (I won't say where to protect the innocent. Well they aren't so innocent, but nonetheless...) And I saw this:

I think it was the sad faces on it that really got to me.

So what do you think was the first thing I did when I took said picture? Yep, posted it to Twitter. Just to share. And the reactions I got were pretty much universal. Many said that wasn't much of a media center since most media was banned. (One person even asked if they banned books there. The answer is no. There are books in there.)

For this particular location where this school is, banning phones or iPods and the such is nothing new. (And actually there is a loosening of the rules this year with schools allowed to decide if they want to use them in the classroom, which is a huge step forward.) What really bothered me was that last sentence.

For a neat and quiet Media Center.


Traditionally, libraries and Media Centers were quiet places. Places for deep study and reflection. But are they still that way? Should they be?

Learning is messy. And learning spaces should be too. Is there a time and a place for a quiet Media Center or learning space? Sure. But does banning these devices automatically make this space "neat and quiet?"

When I was in the classroom, my room was rarely quiet and rarely clean. In science, we had experiments continually going, data collection all over, papers, books, technology stations. But it was controlled chaos. And when my Administrators walked by and my room was quiet, I always got the "What's wrong?" look. It was expected that when we were learning it was going to, well, not be quiet. But again, it was controlled chaos.

I have never been a Librarian or Media Coordinator. (I never thought I was smart enough!) But I wonder how many of them would feel about this sign. Should a modern Media Center be "neat and quiet?" Even if you aren't a Media Coordinator I would enjoy to hear your thoughts on if learning should be messy and how so.