Formative Assessment

My fellow faculty and I have been assigned some professional development reading from Schmoker’s Focus (highly readable, common-sense, and recommended for any educator interested in instruction and assessment).

One of the issues it raises is formative vs. summative assessment, which is a hot trend in education right now. Formative assessment is the kind that assesses where students are at (a snapshot), and summative is a comprehensive assessment of how students have mastered those skills and putting a value on that.

For example, I might spend three weeks working on essay drafts with my students, having them write and submit outlines, all the while giving them placeholder grades and/or feedback on the outlines, first, and second drafts they submit. But I would only grade and count the final draft submitted to me at that end. The drafting process is formative, the final draft summative. (This is just one way of doing formative vs. summative — I prefer not to count the formative grades and count the summative ones, but there are many models out there).

Schmoker suggests that for formative assessment to really work, you have use it as a feedback mechanism to both the student and you, the teacher. You will of course assess students’ work (in my case, rough drafts of essays) to give them feedback on how to get better, but equally as important is you, the teacher, assessing where students are at. Are they understanding your purpose and intent, the content, and the assessment goals, or not? This is key, and it’s an idea I’ve only recently begun to consider on a deep level. Schmoker insists that you should not move on until everyone in the class understands, and your formative assessment should be assessing just that.

I noticed this recently with my personal writing unit in Grade 9 English. I wanted the students to produce clear, effective, personal essays that used a lot of sensory detail to bring the writing to life. So I began with this plan:

1. Step 1 (formative assessment): In-class writing in response to college-essay-inspired prompts like: “Describe an issue, cause, or event you care about and why.”

2. Step 2 (formative assessment): Hand out the rubric and assignment sheet, and ask students to produce a rough draft two-to-three-page personal essay in response to similar prompts as one above. I give written feedback on drafts.

3. Step 3 (summative assessment): Submit final draft for grade.

Only my plan didn’t quite work out that way, because in the formative assessment process, I saw right away that I had overestimated students’ ability to shift from all the analytical writing we’d done all year to more personal, creative writing.

In Step 1, I realized that I had botched the prompts — they were too abstract and sophisticated for my freshmen. I had taken them from American college applications, thinking they were good practice for a few years down the line, but right away I saw the students were not yet old enough to grapple with their nuances. I needed to make them more grade-nine friendly. More importantly, during this Step 1 formative assessment process, I also saw that students were unsure how to approach the essay because of its format — they seemed without a compass for organizing their thoughts in an essay that didn’t fit a persuasive argument model. My fault. We had done so much analytical writing that I foolishly assumed they could just magically switch gears to personal writing; but in drafting, I saw right away that I had forgotten one of the most important steps — models.

So I changed Step 2 completely.

Instead of what I had originally planned, I found four good models of personal essays on Teen Ink, a web site devoted to essays by teenagers. I looked for models that had strong sesnory detail and had very different tones, voices, and styles. One was serious and somber; one was funny and ironic. I chose essays that were the length I wanted my students to write, and I made a packet of the four and handed them out to each student.

They had to read the packet in class, highlight any sensory detail they noticed, and choose their favorite. In pairs, they shared their favorite choices with each other, and then they shared them with the whole class. We discussed which were effective and why, and which essays had the most interesting and effective use of sensory detail.

I then handed out an amended assignment sheet with new, more specific topics, such as: “Think back to your very first day of school at our school. How did you feel? What was it like compared to now? How have you changed?” and “Describe a place that is very special to you, really setting the scene with descriptive, sensory detail. Why is it special to you?”

Then we proceeded to go through the drafting process with several rounds of editing and feedback before the planned final draft.

In short, I learned from the formative assessment as much as (or more than) the kids did. It was a great way for me to check for understanding and realize that I could not simply plow ahead as planned — I needed to back up and redesign so that their understanding would be deeper.

The result? Not sure if it was a product of the more creative assignment itself, the assessment strategy, or a combination of both, but it produced some of the best, most interesting work of the year. Many students were thrilled with their final grades — (for several students, it was the first A-range writing grade they had earned this year.)

So don’t underestimate the power of formative assessment  – for you and your students. Use it not only to give feedback to students, but also (even primarily) as a way to see where the gaps in understanding are so you can readjust accordingly, stepping in where and how as needed with new or more in-depth instruction.

Being a Student

One quick thought, as I am positively buried under end-of-the-year grading, exam writing, comments, awards, etc. Well, truth be told, another reason I am buried right now is because I went away for a long weekend to get my PADI open-water diver certification and am now trying to catch up.

But it was worth it, and not just because I got to dive off the Perhentian Islands and see giant sting rays, schools of barracuda, and lion fish. It was also worth it because I remembered (uncomfortably) what it’s like to be student.

I had to learn a new, scary, and technical skill. I felt nervous and out of my element learning an entirely new skill, like how to breathe and be buoyant at the bottom of the ocean floor. I had to take several quizzes and a written test that required some pretty basic math skills (chart reading to find pressure groups and time limits for planning safe dives), and the anxiety I felt while taking the test was acute. I was fully aware I didn’t remember how to do several of the math questions, and I felt “dumb.” I remember one moment when I could not focus on the test at all because I was so anxious about the problems I did not know how to approach — I couldn’t remember which side of the chart to use for which part of the equation. I had to remind myself to relax for several minutes before I could concentrate and move forward, but I was still anxious, thinking my friends would score better than me, or I that I would fail. I also worried that I would mess up the dive somehow and ruin it for the others.

In short, it was great to be reminded what our students feel like every day. It’s easy to tell kids to relax, not to stress about grades, but there was no pressure at all for me to pass my course — I could take it unlimited times, and the only pressure I felt I put on myself. No one was grading my performance, and no university would ever see my performance on a report card. And, still, I was full of anxiety and so relieved when it was over and I passed.

The moral of the story is: make sure you seek opportunities to learn new things so you can feel “dumb” and not only like the expert.

It’s humbling to feel “dumb” — which is how many of our students feel every day when they score worse on a quiz than friends, or when they have a big presentation due and freeze up. We encourage them to try new things, to be themselves, to grow by taking risks.

But how often do we ourselves practice what we preach?

I’ve already booked my next two dives for the first week of summer break. I’m still nervous (it’s all quite new and daunting to me), but I think that’s a good thing.

Always Learning

Just a follow-up to my last post: one of my biggest challenges this year has been one ninth-grade class (“E block”) that really resists Harkness. They are quite shy and loathe to say much of anything at all, and they all joke about how they “hate” Harkness. In five years of teaching using Harkness, I haven’t ever experienced this, so it threw me for a loop. I’d assumed that sooner or later they’d come around, as their other peers had, to the process, but it’s nearly May and they haven’t.

And then during my EARCOS presentation in Bangkok, where I showed maps of E block’s discussions and talked about the challenges specific to them, one of the audience members asked if I’d tried breaking them into two circles within the class and letting them discuss in smaller groups. I hadn’t ever tried it, but I liked the idea — one my colleague used with her second-graders when she piloted Harkness for me at the elementary level.

We tried it today in class and the whole vibe was immediately different. All the kids talked, the discussion was constant and lively, and the discussion maps were (as one students remarked) “beautiful” — even, balanced, and uniform. Even my shiest students participated of their own volition — something that had rarely or ever happened after nearly a year of large Harkness discussions. Afterward, during our debrief, students acknowledged how much easier and more enjoyable this was. “I think we’ve figured out how to do Harkness in this class,” I remarked, unable to hide my smile.

So glad I got the chance to learn from someone in the audience that day at EARCOS (thank you, anonymous audience member!), and glad for opportunities to learn in the classroom — for my students and me.

 

Earcos 2012 and Harkness 2.0

I had a great trip to Bangkok for Earcos 2012 and a wonderful time presenting there on Harkness method. My Earcos school rep told me to plan for twenty attendees, and 80+ showed up — I ran out of packets quite fast. I met some wonderful teachers doing really cool things, like Evan Weinberg — a math teacher who is looking for more opportunities for discussion in his classes (always cool to see this happening in math). I was really surprised and excited by how many people emailed me later to ask for help in spreading Harkness method to their schools. I hope to have the chance to travel some more to share this work with educators at conferences and other schools.

For anyone interested in the work I’ve been doing, this is what it is in a nutshell: Harkness method is a specific kind of Socratic seminar that originated at Phillips Exeter Academy in the early 20th century. I learned a version of Harkness at The Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, NY, when I taught there, a version that included group grading (the whole class gets an A, or the whole class gets a D, etc.), which in my mind is key to the whole method. I continued to hone my use of Harkness method over the years so that it fostered what I believe to be the most crucial skills for today’s graduates: problem-solving, collaboration, communication, and self-evaluation. I’m really happy with the results, and it’s exciting to share the work at this stage — though it continues to be a work in progress in my classroom.

I have made efforts to address concerns by math and science teachers that Harkness can’t really be done in their disciplines (Exeter has used Harkness exclusively in its math program for 25 years, and there is some interesting data on how discussion improves learning in the sciences), and I have piloted Harkness in two second-grade classrooms at my current school to see how it works at the elementary level (it worked quite well, but the younger students need more structure and scaffolding).

For anyone interested in more details on the particular way I use Harkness method — or what I like to call Harkness 2.0 — please check out the wiki with all the documents, videos, and links related to my workshop.

Give Me More (Good) PD, Please

Let’s be honest: PD isn’t what it could be.

I’m preparing for a presentation I’ll be giving at the EARCOS conference in Bangkok next week, and the driving force behind my planning was the question: What can teachers take away that is immediately helpful, practical, and concrete so that they can go use it?

I wish more professional development was designed this way. While I would thoroughly enjoy an witty, inspirational talk by the likes of Sir Ken Robinson for a PD day, the truth is I’m likely to get less out of that than out of a unknown teacher who comes in with a presentation that says: here is a great idea, here is exactly how to use it in your classroom, and here are the answers to all the challenges you might face in doing so.

Most of the PD I have attended over the past decade falls into two strands: cool, big-name speakers or admin-driven curricular projects.

The first is often very interesting – it gets people thinking and talking, but that’s it. There is nothing actually done with that interesting information we learned. So if we are lucky enough to see Sir Ken lament the death of creativity in schools and extol the virtues of creative thinking, we will likely find ourselves nodding in agreement, feeling quite personally moved by how he has his finger on the problem — a problem we see in our classrooms every day. But then the pragmatic pedagogue in me says, “But Sir Ken, what is the solution?” This is where the PD seems to end. I’ve never been involved in professional development that really tackled solutions, at least not in a profound way. “We are moving to block schedules, so here is a presentation on block scheduling and the issues you may face next year.” OK. That was informative. We disperse and are meant to think about that information and those challenges, think through some of the ways we might have to adjust our teaching, and maybe we discuss it as an afterthought in a department meeting. But after PD that involves an outside speaker or a big, new initiative, why can’t there be a multi-faceted and thorough follow-up from the top down?

Imagine an approach that has the block schedule speaker come, then has faculty brainstorm and narrow down the 3 – 5 biggest concerns or challenges to the change in schedule. Then the faculty is broken into logically-sorted groups and tasked with coming up with as many solutions or work-arounds to the challenges as they can. These are shared in subsequent faculty meetings. Let’s say one of the concerns for block scheduling is that language and math teachers worry that longer blocks every other day is less conducive to learning their subjects; these teachers worry they won’t be able to cover as much without marching through the text and that the longer classes will result in student boredom. The job, then, is to devise concrete solutions to this problem. Admin says come back with solutions to these next meeting. So groups of teachers go off and creatively try to solve this problem. They might contact other schools that have already moved to block scheduling to survey them on how they might have successfully tackled this. They might brainstorm among themselves that they will break every block class into two halves: content delivery and synthesis/transfer, so that each language teacher commits to using half of the period for content learning (vital to language learning) and the other half for writing and acting short plays involving the new content. They would then share all of their suggestions with the larger faculty in subsequent PD, which inspires new debate and discussion. Admin might then say, alright, for PD next time, each department together, please design a block-schedule class in your discipline or grade level, and one teacher will teach that class to a smattering of other disciplines’ teachers during the next PD session.  After every teacher sees or teaches one of these block classes, then everyone will give feedback on what they’ve learned. In subsequent PD sessions, teachers will compare challenges and surprises, and address possible solutions to them.

Can you imagine if that is what PD looked like for every big initiative or guest speaker? Imagine just how challenging, practical, and helpful that would be to all the teachers if the PD process were that ongoing, collaborative and profound. Yes, it would be a lot of work, but not busy work. This would be getting-your-hands-dirty-for-a-reason work. And isn’t that the best kind? In short, it would truly be professional development. Too often an outsider is brought in, often at great expense, and there is no follow-through at all, and almost never with real faculty involvement. This is a mistake. Any initiative worth implementing is worth doing well. And notice that there is no further financial commitment to this kind of approach — just a commitment from the top right on down that this is something we are all going to solve together, as opposed to merely highlighting problems and talking about them enthusiastically. We can often get bogged down in problems in education, but we too rarely practice problem-solving in a committed way.

The second kind of PD is the curricular initiative — introducing student portfolios, designing an MYP curriculum that aligns, devising a common assessment across grade levels and group grading them. These are great and worthwhile initiatives, of course, but they often suffer from a lack of backwards thinking. Why are we doing these initiatives in the first place? Admin often takes for granted that everyone on staff knows and understands the answer to that question. Take student portfolios, and ask the question first to all the faculty: “Why do we want our students to have portfolios?” The answers will come rolling in: to keep a record of all assessments and growth; to help teachers assess that progress and growth, to show parents that growth; so students can learn to self-asses their own growth; to aid in the possible implementation of student-led conferences; as models for teachers to showcase the varied ability in a given grade or class; etc. etc. The brainstorm alone helps get everyone to see the benefits of such an initiative without assuming that they already know them all (they don’t). But the brainstorm alone isn’t enough; it would be helpful to work backwards from the question: “What does a great portfolio look like and how can it help my student?” Asking teachers to devise answers to these questions would be much more conducive to professional development than merely saying: “Here are all the reasons why portfolios are great. Please do them.” Or, far worse, no explanation at all of why, and just: “Do them.”

I will confess that the single most helpful PD I have ever had is what I call “stealing tricks.” It’s the speaker who comes in and says, specific to your age level and discipline, “Here’s what works, here’s how to do it, now go ahead and do it.” I’m talking about the nitty-gritty details. Ten years ago we had a brain-based learning speaker at one of the schools I used to work at and I don’t remember a thing he told us about the brain. But I vividly remember an activity he asked us to do, which was to break into small groups, decide on a fairy tale that we all knew, and re-write it using certain rules. One group’s rule was to not use any nouns. Another group couldn’t repeat any words at all. Another group couldn’t use verbs.  It was a very specific activity that was highly engaging and funny, but it addressed certain skills that were relevant to my discipline (parts of speech practice, avoiding repetition in writing, the art vs. science of communication). I have used it, and my own iterations, many times over the years, and always with great success. It was useful because it was practical and immediate — a trick I could steal.

Here is my PD fantasy: that the majority of PD schools spend their time on is not about initiatives or speakers at all, but about the capital right in the building: its faculty. Watching other teachers teach has been far and away the very best PD I have ever, ever received. I think it’s hugely underrated in terms of benefit (not to mention cost benefit!). In Models by Design, an approach I’m designing that uses models to enhance teaching and learning, one of the key “models” is our own colleagues. They are a wealth of PD right next door, and we almost never knock to go in and see. Why not?

So here are two conrete, pragmatic, and immediate suggestions for PD over a school year:

1. Teachers pair up with at least one other teacher in their discipline or grade level and they agree to observe each other in class a minimum of five times throughout one school year. Each time, the observer will take notes and afterward share informal feedback. This can be kept between the teachers and doesn’t need to be reported to admin, but it would be helpful to fill out a self-assessment form at the year’s end that asks each teacher to state what he or she has learned, if anything, from watching his or her partner and from the partner’s feedback. In addition, it would be ideal if each teacher could be paired with a teacher outside his age group or discipline as well (a first-grade teacher with a sixth-grade one; an AP math teacher and a grade nine English teacher) and do the same observation at least twice a year, also with feedback. It’s absolutely amazing how much we can learn when we get outside our classroom bubble, especially in a discipline that is unfamiliar to us. Some of the best feedback I ever received was from a colleague when she and I were paired up in this way. PD time that is built into the week could be used for feedback between pairs and the year-end self-assessment so that teachers feel that this is a priority for them and the administration — they aren’t asked to do this all on their own time.

2. Institute three PD days a year called Teachers Teaching Teachers for which each teacher will have to teach a forty-five minute class on something relevant to other teachers– How they have used technology in a new or useful way in their classroom; how they devised a new approach to assessment and how it’s working; or how they use Essential Questions in their teaching. Each teacher would do one of these a year and are audience members for the other two days when they aren’t presenting. This is the fastest, cheapest, and most effective way to spread good ideas and best practice in a school. It’s a great use of PD. I can’t understand why not every school does it. And, in addition, I imagine a similar exercise that is slightly different: a day in which teachers teach a class that is related to his/her discipline but of his/her choosing. The physics teacher might do a “Physics for Dummies” session; the grade 1 teacher might do a class on the life cycle of butterflies; the Spanish teacher might do a lesson on the poetry of Pablo Neruda; the PE teacher a yoga class. The main objective of this kind of session is not to spread best practice or good ideas, per se, but to give and get feedback on how effective and engaging you can be in your teaching. I, personally, would really try to up my game for a discerning teacher audience and think carefully about how best to engage them; this could start many conversations about how well we do this with our students. It’s also just a cool way to see another side of our colleagues — their passions with regard to their discipline — and how we might better tap that passion in our daily teaching.

Ultimately, the test of PD should not be whether or not we all sat through something for the allotted amount of time; all too often, this is the only criteria for PD. The better use of that time and money is to work backwards, to make it deep and ongoing, and to tap into the biggest resource we have already, our own experts.

Fiction vs. Fact

In a post a few weeks ago I argued that the trend of pushing more non-fiction in English/Language Arts classes was flawed; the teaching of literature has real and important benefits, including the teaching of empathy, the ability for students to test out new and scary concepts, and improving people skills, which might really be lost in a majority-non-fiction curriculum.

But now I’ll argue the other side.

Not everyone loves literature. Not everyone loves to study fiction, memoir, and poetry. Not everyone loves to write analytical essays about the metaphorical nature of trains in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina or argue whether or not The Catcher in the Rye is a bildungsroman or not. I admit that I do love those things, but I fully understand that I am in the minority there.

Which is why I am just about giddy that I have been assigned to teach the IB’s new Language and Literature course next fall to juniors in their first year of the IB program. The course is two years long, divided into four semesters: two semesters of literature and two of “language.” And by language, the IB does not mean grammar. The two language semesters are split into one semester of language study and one of media. The IB suggests teachers may ask students to consider concepts such as the relationship between language and gender, language and class, and language and power. They might read political speeches or study propaganda — its methods and effects.

I can’t wait. While I do love teaching the IB Literature course this year to a small, dedicated group of motivated readers, I’m already amassing material for the fall, when I will start with the “Language” semester. I’ve been brainstorming some ideas, like:

1. Have them look at an “easy” poem like Lewis Carroll’s “The Jabberwocky” and deconstruct it as an introduction to how to write commentaries (a specific kind of essay on the IB English exam). One of the things they notice straight away is that more than 50% of the poem’s diction is made up. We examine how Carroll still follows the rules of English grammar, but with nonsense words. We look up several of the words in the dictionary, such as “chortle,” which Carroll coined from this very poem, to see how to explore etymology and study how words are introduced into the language. Students then write their own poems, using at least 50% made-up diction.

2. I have ordered a class set of Bill Bryson’s wonderful, funny read Mother Tongue, which explores the history of the English language in a way that’s actually fascinating. There is a whole chapter on swears and how they came to be taboo. We’d read this chapter and discuss how and why words become taboo, how that relates to culture, etc. For example, many of the worst curse words in English are related to the body; in Spanish and Italian they are related to the church; in Cantonese they are related to family. We’d then read an article by an African-American scholar on the “n-word” and whether it’s acceptable for black rappers and performers to use this word or not (and perhaps delve into the debate about whether it’s OK for white rappers and performers to do the same). To follow-up, we’d watch a video with Oprah Winfrey interviewing rapper and business mogul Jay-Z about this very topic, in which Oprah strongly disagrees with Jay-Z’s opinion that it’s OK to use the n-word, opening up the discussion about the power (negative and positive) that language and its history has. We’d discuss, read, and write about the language we are expected or allowed to use in one setting versus another and read Amy Tan’s funny, poignant essay “Mother Tongue” on this very topic. Students could write their own essays about the language they use with friends vs. the one they use with, say, grandparents.

3. This idea came to me when the word “pimp” came up in my grade 9 class; students used it to describe Holden’s roommate in The Catcher in the Rye, Stradlater. I was a little shocked that they were calling him a pimp, and I asked what they meant. “You know,” they all said, boys and girls alike, “a handsome guy. A ladies’ man.” I asked if they knew what a pimp originally meant, and only one or two in each class of twenty did. This bowled me over, and I thought it offered an interesting language lesson in how words gain and lose their meaning and what new meanings imply — in this case about gender and power. Since kids engage so well with learning related to the music they love, I’d ask students to bring in rap, rock, and pop songs’ lyrics in which the word “pimp” appears. We’d examine the lyrics in detail and whether the word has positive or negative connotations. I’d then ask them to read this article and this one by Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times about the realities of teenage prostitution and the role that pimps play in enslaving young women into that world; we’d examine whether the term has positive or negative connotations in these articles. I’d try to find some good documentary footage of brothel raids, especially here in Southeast Asia where we live, since human trafficking and prostitution is a big problem in our part of the world. The purpose is to continue our understanding and discussion about how a word’s history and original meaning can be twisted and sanitized, whether that is a good or bad thing, and what we should do about it — if anything.

4. This is something I’ve long wanted to do but never found the time or venue, since most schools where I’ve worked have a clear curriculum (read: content march) we need to get through. But I’d use the very broad, general IB guidelines on language to justify delving into a study of a spectrum of writing styles and their effectiveness. We’d look at tweets and what qualities of tweets make them successful or retweetable. Who has the most followers vs. who has the best tweets? We’d look at Facebook status updates and try to examine what kind of updates get the most “likes” and why — is it related to writing style, subject matter, or something else? We’d examine what kind of register and style are used to write an effective tweet, vs. an effective blog, vs. an effective college essay, vs. an effective cover letter, vs. and effective email trying to get something you want from someone you don’t know. Any in-depth examination of the different writing samples gets students thinking about register, style, and audience — all things we want them to keep in mind in their writing, but we rarely give them a reason why. I’d ask students to write all of these different kinds of writing formats themselves — perhaps even one of each that they deem “effective” and a justification for why, and one of each that is “ineffective” and why. I love the idea of reading through a series of “effective” and “ineffective” status updates.

These are just my very incipient brainstorms, but — as you can see — I’m really excited to have the freedom and the time to ask students to read a huge variety of text, examining language, content, and purpose in new and highly engaging ways. And the reason I have the time and framework within which to do this is because the IB has decided that not all students need four straight semesters of literature study. And I agree.

But literature lovers, do not fear: I’m also plotting how to mix in poetry, short fiction, and short drama texts into these lessons on language and media as well. I do still think the study of literature is valid and even necessary, and am glad the whole IB Language and Lit course is 50% literature. But I’m thrilled the IB is giving us all the green light to open up the parameters in ELA. We should think much more broadly about the study of English — it shouldn’t be all Shakespeare and Shelley and comma rules. We need some current, engaging, pop-culture-y, technological lenses for ELA as well.

Plan. To Adjust.

My dad is fond of saying just that: plan. To adjust. It’s his way of describing how best to design curriculum in that we should have a clear plan of where we are going but be flexible about the way we get there, allowing for adjustments along the way.

The “adjust” part hit home for me this week.

I had pre-assessed my grade 9s on their grammar knowledge and they seemed relatively strong on the pre-assessment. They also assured me they had spent the bulk of their time in eighth grade drilling grammar, so I planned to do a brief run-through of parts of speech and then move on to phrases and punctuation (so that we could use this understanding to combat fragment and run-on sentences.)

I gave them a brief lecture on parts of speech, we practiced identifying parts of speech in class, we did several Mad Libs, and we repeated my parts-of-speech mantra over and over: “What is this word doing here?” which is my way of reminding them that verbs are only verbs when they act like verbs (compare the word “run” in the sentences “I run every day” to “I want to go for a run.”) I taught them clues for identifying nouns (put an article in front of it; substitute another noun in its place), gerunds (ditto), prepositions (imagine a little mouse and two cardboard boxes. The mouse is in the box, on the box, under the box, beside the box, between the boxes, etc.), and the acronym FANBOYS to memorize the coordinating conjunctions. I offered extra-help practice after school before the quiz and twenty-five kids attended. The students seemed pretty solid with the parts of speech. My plan was to give the parts-of-speech quiz and then move on to phrases and clauses the following week.

But then half the class bombed the quiz. 10 – 15% scored less than 50% and only one student out of 70 got every part of speech identification correct. Looking over the quizzes later, I realized I had made the quiz too hard — a bit harder than most of the practice we had had; and students did not know as much as I thought they did. I knew this because about a third of my students made mistakes, like labeling pronouns as adverbs, or adjectives as verbs, that show a very weak grasp on understanding how the parts of speech function.

So I scrapped my plan to move on to phrases, clauses, and punctuation next week. I decided to spend the rest of the quarter on parts of speech until they really understand it. (For the record, I am a fan of teaching the grammar that is most directly linked to writing errors common in student writing; I want a student to be able to know that she can’t write, “She sat next to Alex and I” because “Alex and ‘I’” are the objects of the preposition and therefore must use object pronouns. She should write “Alex and me” because that is grammatically correct. But I can’t explain the concept if the student does not understand or recognize what a preposition is.)

The bulk of our focus right now isn’t grammar, but rather The Catcher in the Rye. We are about a third of the way through the book and students took a break from reading the novel last night to read a chapter from The 7 Habits of Highly Successful Teens by Sean Covey. I thought a couple of chapters from that book would serve two purposes: allow students to analyze Holden from a more psychological lens (“He complains a lot and blames others for everything”) rather than an emotional one (“He’s so annoying!”). But I also want students to consider their own adolescent and psychological mindsets, and the book offers many ways to do that.

My original plan was to have students come in to class to discuss the 7 Habits reading and compare it to Catcher. But I “adjusted” at the last minute, based on those weak grammar quizzes.

Usually my class is set up in a circle, but I put the desk in clusters of three and four and strategically seated students so there would be a mix of abilities in each group. I asked them to take out a piece of paper and I said, “You have 120 seconds to brainstorm as many adjectives as you can to describe Holden. Go!” They were off like a shot. They began firing off lists of descriptions to each other and scribbling them down. The energy and excitement rose as the clock ticked down and some groups would hear other groups’ answers and steal them, causing protests and laughter from across the room. When the buzzer sounded, I asked them to tally their adjectives and announce who had the most. We then went through each list, questioning whether each was an adjective. “Idiot” was struck from the winning team’s list, because, as another student pointed out, it was a noun. “How would we make ‘idiot’ and adjective?” I asked. They wrestled with that until one girl suggested “idiotic.”

My “adjustment” plan had been to use only adjectives as the brainstorm and then to move on to the 7 Habits work, tying it in to the students’ descriptions, but the parts of speech race was working so well — students were so engaged and energized — that I decided on the spot to keep it going. I realized the potential to correct students’ errors on masse on the spot was a really valuable use of class time.

“OK,” I said. “You have 120 seconds to come up with as many adverbs as you can to describe how Holden acts. Go!” In each class, a few sharp kids noted that you could add “-ly” to most of their adjectives to form adverbs that would describe how Holden acted. Again we counted down, tallied up, read them out for errors, laughed over funny mistakes, and gave a point to the winning team.

It wasn’t until a second ninth grade class later in the day that I realized we could do the same with nouns. “120 seconds to list as many nouns that accurately depict Holden. For example, he’s ‘a slacker.’ Go!” We had great fun with these lists, as students exhausted the possible nouns with such examples as “son” and “homo sapien.” It was a great way to distinguish between adjectives and nouns, such as “cynic vs. cynical.”

In the second class we also had a tie between the top teams and needed a tiebreaker. I quickly racked my brain and it came to me: “OK, you must write sentences that are true statements about Holden that have a preposition in them, and you can only use each preposition once total. Go!” This was significantly more challenging to them, and shortly there were questions like, “Is ‘without’ a preposition?” When I assured them it was, students wrote, “Holden is without his mother.” The winning team blew the competition away by focusing on simple true statements, such as “Holden is above the ground. Holden is below the sky.” There was a little chocolate for the winning team and the mood in both classes of grade nine was one of high energy and good humor.

After this parts-of-speech brainstorm, students were asked to examine the “paradigms” that Holden was centered on, according to the paradigms listed in the 7 Habits reading. They then had to search for quotes in their books to support their ideas. They then had to suggest a paradigm shift to a principle, per the 7 Habits suggestions for being a successful teen, and find a quote to support their thinking on that as well. For example, one group of students decided Holden was centered on the paradigms of lying and siblings. They found quotes to support these ideas and wrote them down. They then suggested he shift his paradigm to the principles of honesty and school, so that he lies less and doesn’t fail out of any more schools. They found two quotes to support the idea that this would be a positive paradigm shift for Holden. Lastly, they created a visual metaphor to represent Holden in a symbolic way, per their thinking about his paradigms. One group decided to make a puzzle, with each piece representing an aspect of Holden’s life: school, family, girls, etc. The final piece represented Holden and didn’t fit with the puzzle — it had the wrong shape to fit and complete the puzzle.

The final product at the end of class was a poster for each group that listed the three best descriptors of Holden from their list of brainstormed parts of speech to describe him, his current paradigms (with quotes to support), a suggestion for a principle he should focus on (with quotes to support), the visual metaphor, and a brief explanation of the metaphor.

Both classes worked very productively and I was really pleased with the result. In one class period, students were able to work more deeply on their knowledge and understanding of parts of speech, character analysis, using textual quotations to support ideas, correct MLA citation, and metaphorical thinking.

I’m so glad the students’ poor grammar quizzes stopped me in my tracks and led me down a different path. Sometimes “adjusting” can be the best plan of all.