Teaching at GHP

Here are some more ways to measure progress in your class without testing.

Behavior change

If you have a student who is not participating, engaged, or productive, then start pushing for behavior change and measure that.

You can measure overt behavior: does he now shut up and listen to others in the group? Is he more orderly in his productivity?

You can measure intellectual behavior as well: has he improved in his ability to argue a point? Has he ratcheted up his level of response to the material?

It is perfectly fine to make your goals for a student explicit to him. “I’ve noticed that you hang back when we’re discussing the essay. What’s up with that? What can we do to get you more comfortable jumping in?”

Habits of Mind

Robert Marzano, in his Dimensions of Learning, proposed “Habits of Mind” as the fifth dimension/area. These are behaviors of a mature, metacognitive learner, and we certainly should expect our students to be able to be outstanding in all the criteria Marzano developed.

There are thirteen of these criteria, and they include things like tolerating ambiguity, being aware of and sensitive to other’s level of learning, being accurate and seeing accuracy, setting one’s own standards, etc.

We strongly urge you to look through the following links:

• From Marzano’s Assessing Student Learning, the thirteen Habits of Mind standards [pdf], including the top of the four-point rubric he presents in that book. Look for these behaviors; provoke these behaviors.
• A slightly different take from Art Costa and Bena Kallick: Describing 16 Habits of Mind [pdf]
• Theorising Habits of Mind as a Framework for Learning [pdf]

Feedback

Finally, if you really want to know how the class is going, ask. Have a discussion at the end of the week about how things went. Do a survey. Have them write in their journals. Ask them if it was challenging, engaging, interesting. Listen, and respond accordingly.

By the end of the first week, you ought to have seen enough of these indicators to know whether each student is working appropriately and whether your instruction is hitting the mark. If you see anything wrong, it’s time to intervene. Do not wait until the fourth week to come to me and complain about a student “not doing any of the work”!

If you are in a department that rotates kids, make sure you share your observations about problem students with the others in your department so that everyone can bear down on the problem.

Next up, what we do to evaluate you!

We don’t do tests or grades at GHP—students receive no formal evaluaton or credit for their participation in the program. So how do we tell if we—and they—are doing a good job?

Participation

First, check for participation. Is the student actually participating in class? Are all the students participating in class? (We might as well say at this point that we are all sleep deprived by week 4, but no one sleeps during class time.)

Does the student bring things to the group? Does he follow up on other people’s comments? Does he read the passage you’ve assigned? Does he jump into the discussion?

Is the kid participating in the program as a whole? Does he go to seminars, to concerts?

Engagement

Is the kid engaged with the material? With his peers? With you and other adults? Is he engaged with the program?

There is a difference between participation and engagement. A student can participate but not be engaged at all.

Here’s Dale’s classic example:

I was observing a theatre class one morning, and they were doing one of those circle exercises, where a kid in the middle was performing some repetitive action. Everyone in the circle was mirroring the motion. Eventually the person in the middle would go over to another student in the circle, “transferring” the motion to the new person, who would move into the circle. The new person would modify the motion somehow, and the process would continue.

One young man attracted my attention. He was certainly participating: he was doing all the motions and paying enough attention to mirror the motion when it changed. But he was in no way engaged. His whole demeanor said, “My teacher told me to come because it would look good on my resumé, but since they don’t do ‘real plays,’ I won’t learn anything.” And he wasn’t learning anything. Watch out for the non-engaged.

Conversely, you may have a student who is intently engaged, just devouring your class and the program as a whole, but isn’t participating in class. You have to watch out for these “quiet ones” as well and help them find a way to jump into the pool with everyone else.

Productivity

Is the kid producing? Is he actually doing the work: reading, writing, finding data, warming up, finishing assignments, taking risks?

Believe it or not, we actually will have kids who decide that since there’s not a grade hanging over their head, they don’t have to do any work. If this kid is in your class, speak to him right friendly in his ear, and if that doesn’t work, call Marcie in. We’ll rough him up a bit explain to him how GHP works and his role in it, and if he still doesn’t “participate fully in the program,” as his handbook says, we’ll send him home. (Usually with this kind of kid there are other programmatic issues as well.)

Participation—engagement—productivity. Look for these three markers, and look for them assiduously the first week. They are your best indicators of how well the students are coping with the program.

In our next post, we”ll discuss a few factors which indicate how well your carefully designed instruction is going.