That title probably captured your attention! I actually found this article on Web MD. Quite probably, people are inserting other people’s poop into themselves for personal medical reasons. Read the article if you are curious. Here’s the URL: http://www.webmd.com/digestive-disorders/news/20151209/diy-fecal-transplant?page=3

I believe this article. I also believe that the Superintendent in Los Angeles and the Mayor should hold their ground. This evening’s news was filled with silly analysis of the closure of Los Angeles Public Schools due to a bomb threat. The closure is receding into the past even as I write this, and I hope we don’t see similar incidents in the near future. In the meantime, you can’t change the past. That closure was a good-faith effort and I, for one, would not want to be the Superintendent who decided the schools were safe because “Allah was not capitalized,” a point used to support the idea that this bomb threat was obviously fraudulent. We need to keep in mind that Los Angeles and San Bernardino are close neighbors. Emotions are running raw in Southern California.

I lived through a bomb threat some years ago. My then-Principal used two fire drills to get students outside. The local police swept the school for bombs while students stood outside. That was a year of false alarms and students remained oblivious to the drama. We live in exciting times.

Eduhonesty: To close or not to close, that was the question. The answer was to shut the doors, and are we honestly going to object because no bombs went off? America needs to stop second-guessing honest efforts to do the right thing.

Unless grades are due tomorrow or you are certain you must work on those grades to meet a deadline — quit. O.K. you might have to write a quiz or something, but if possible — Stop. Read a book. Go to bed.

Teachers sometimes end up sick over break because they try to do it all. With all the outside demands on time in December, you can easily wipe yourself out. I recommend taking the advice they give new mothers: Nap when you can. Rest when you can.

Eduhonesty: If those cups of coffee keep getting taller and darker, consider putting on your jammies, making some cocoa, propping up a few pillows and pulling out a good book. If you are feeling like you can’t get it all done, then DON’T. Some items, like finals and the grades, are not optional. But if the your classroom’s not quite as neat as you’d like and your plans for next semester remain hazy, give yourself a break. Let it go.

With or without a McMuffin, you deserve a break today.

Teaching evaluations have been called dog-and-pony shows for years. Those dog and pony shows may have masked unfortunate changes in the educational climate of our time. Yes, we always hyperplanned those short hours, with spiffy visuals, auditory back-up and manipulatives to sideswipe any kinesthetic learners who had somehow missed our point. We prepared sets of questions designed to demonstrate how cleverly we steered student conversation and how much our students were learning.

No one expected every day to be a dog-and-pony show, though. Most especially, the kids knew that most days were not going to include all pieces of the teaching puzzle, neatly bundled up for their entertainment. My post from two days ago captures a slice of today’s classroom life. Students expect classes to attempt to entertain them now. They expect the glitz and glamour of computers, games, and gallery walks through classrooms and hallways.

I remember three years ago when I had the temerity to suggest students make flash cards so they could work on their vocabulary together.

“MAKE FLASH CARDS?!?” The voices held disbelief.

Where was the spiffy computer program? If they had to use cards, where were their cards? Make cards? You would have thought I’d told them to clean the parking lot with toothbrushes. I ran into that roadblock every so often in the Spanish 1 class in question. Memorize lists of words? What??

“I am going to get Rosetta Stone this summer so I can learn Spanish,” one boy told me. He was pretty upset that after three months of Spanish, he could only say a few words and phrases. If he had done what I suggested, he might have known considerably more, but I doubt I could have satisfied that boy. He wanted it to be easy. He wanted it to be fast. He wanted to be regularly entertained. He did not want to work, however.

Eduhonesty: I am not against “engaging” lessons. I am not against trying to make learning fun. I love to try to make funny PowerPoints, actually, when I can get my laughs and still get my lesson across. I like games. I support using computer programs to reinforce learning — though, I think those programs are much less effective for introducing new material. But I am afraid the engagement pendulum may have swung too far. Learning cannot always be condensed into sound bites. Students should not feel they have a “right” not to be bored. When confronted with work, sometimes now I see students becoming petulant, sulky at the thought that they might have to give up their trip to the mall or evening’s texting and gaming to do homework. Disappointment would not bother me. I felt disappointed when my plans were interrupted as a kid, when I realized that I was going to be stuck doing math for an hour or more, and I am sure the teacher could see that on my face.

Those occasional expressions of petulance are another matter, however. Underneath some pouty faces, I can see entitlement peeking out. Students should not feel that their teacher owes them a good time in class or a free evening for gaming. Our students are taught early about rights, and by middle school many can advocate for their rights with passion and conviction. Where did so many of students get the idea that they have the right to be entertained, though, while not also understanding that they have a responsibility to learn new material — and that responsibility does not somehow vanish because the new material’s presentation does not meet student standards?

Again, we are failing to prepare some students for real life. When they get to college, that visiting professor from Korea may lecture nonstop, without stopping for a fun activity during the whole semester. When they find employment, they will not be able to skip taking inventory because they don’t like tedious, detail work, not if they want to keep their job or get ahead. They will find their taxes are not optional and whining won’t make their taxes easier. If they opt for the EZ form, they are likely to be giving away money, especially when they start to climb the economic ladder.

The unluckiest students will continue to do just well enough to keep their jobs, while whining their way out of possible promotional opportunities. They will sulk their way out of marriages when the going gets tough and then wonder why they are alone. They will walk through life with a vague sense of dissatisfaction, not realizing that the world does not owe them entertainment.

Many driver’s education courses in the public schools are gone now, victims of budget cuts and test-score concerns. Driver’s ed never improved any school’s test scores, unfortunately. My local schools still offer driver’s education but, in many areas now, the only options are private, for-pay schools. Still, a few, hearty driver’s ed teachers are still hitting the road in our public schools.

They get into the car with adolescents who sometimes have zero experience behind a wheel. For that alone, they deserve a medal. (Either that or maybe a psych evaluation…) Nerves of steel or no sense at all, they are the people who launch many of America’s teen-age drivers. They sit patiently while cars jerk, jump and bounce over curbs. They provide advice about using mirrors to students who appear to be relying on telepathy to tell them the location of nearby cars. They emphasize the need to brake to students who instinctively hit the gas. They sit patiently while other students tap, tap, tap and sometimes nonstop wham, wham, wham that brake.

The push toward online learning has created online driving courses. In the end, though, our young drivers have to get behind the wheel and find their gas pedals. While I am writing this post, I’ll salute the parents and private driving instructors who nervously sit, strapped and trapped in passenger seats, as sixteen-year-old kids take the helm and head down the road.

I talked to a driver’s ed teacher for awhile yesterday, an attractive Hispanic woman who was sharing a hospital waiting room with me. She’s not in the public school system. She works for one of the small schools that teach driving to kids and adults who are not part of the public school driving curriculum. She talks to young adults all the time. They tell her that school is boring. They don’t enjoy their Spanish classes. They don’t enjoy much within the walls of their school.

I believe she is accurately sharing the opinions she hears. I have two very different responses to comments like these:

1) Who said it was supposed to be fun anyway? No wonder so many kids are having trouble keeping jobs and moving away from home. Young adults quit positions because, “my job wasn’t any fun,” or “my boss was too hard on me,” leaving themselves with no income and no back-up plan. I’m sure that’s not a lesson that schools intend to teach, but we may be inadvertently contributing to a lack of employment staying-power.

The idea that lessons should be entertaining crops up in education classes all the time. University professors emphasize making lessons “engaging.” Engaging and entertaining are close cousins. Newly minted teachers are encouraged to throw in that entertainment piece, the enjoyable activity that will somehow drive the lesson home. I am afraid we have been trying to “engage” our students for so many years now that students have come to feel they are owed a good time by all.

2) Our push to teach to tests really has sucked the fun out of school. When teachers don’t step off the track, but do bell-to-bell teaching of the core curriculum, we can turn students off by the lack of variety, even when we manage to work that fun activity into the lesson. Fun activity #34 for learning fractions may be 29 fun activities too many, given in too short a time. Breaks and variety do help to maintain student attention.

If items one and two above don’t exactly fit together, well, that’s the conflict in my response.

“A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of
many bad measures.”
~ Daniel Webster (1782 – 1852)

I am afraid the repeal of No Child Left Behind will not prove the cure-all that many people desire.

We have built large organizations and hired uncountable people to oversee NCLB and to meet its targets, within government bodies and within school districts. Those bureaucracies may alter their mission statements, but I doubt they are going away, even if the law that created their jobs has gone away. I doubt the push toward a Common Curriculum will be disappear. I doubt the tendency to try to solve local educational problems through sweeping legislative acts will vanish, although we have empowered states and many of those laws will now originate in state capitols rather than Washington D.C. Most importantly, I doubt that test-based evaluation of school districts will become a thing of the past. Too many constituents are invested in the Common Core, our tests, and our laws.

There’s something beautifully soothing about a fact – even (or perhaps especially) if we’re not sure what it means. ~Daniel J. Boorstin

Skip this post if you hate technical details and numbers. The following information is helpful in understanding why education has become such an unwieldy mess in the recent past, but it’s also filled with historical details relating to No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Understanding the federal government’s contribution to our progressively-more-standardized educational system may be useful, but it’s probably optional in terms of grasping the problems that standardization poses for our diverse – and diversifying — student bodies.

The following information describes the now-defunct federal education law No Child Left Behind (NCLB), and its many requirements for districts, schools and teachers. NCLB has been in the process of being quietly dismantled or at least adapted, since we hit the final target year in 2014 for a set of improvements that never happened, but the federal government just signed NCLB’s death warrant yesterday. There was no chance from the beginning that this law could work, but to understand what is happening in education today, it is advantageous to understand NCLB. The current administration had been granting numerous waivers to states that failed to hit targets and I imagine they got tired of the paperwork. More than a decade into the most ambitious education program ever attempted in this country, we just scrapped all those efforts with a few pen strokes.

Let’s look at a little history, though. The history is instructive. That history also been destructive as well.

From the June 13, 2014 Huffington Post:
No Child Left Behind Waivers Granted To 33 U.S. States, Some with Strings Attached Posted: 07/19/2012 12:01 am Updated: 08/13/2012 11:04 am
By Thursday, the Obama administration will have waived 32 states and Washington, D.C. from No Child Left Behind — sort of.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is gearing up to announce that Arizona, Washington, D.C., Oregon, South Carolina, Kansas, Michigan, and Mississippi are now exempt from No Child Left Behind’s rigorous test requirements through the administration’s waivers. In a Wednesday call with reporters, Duncan called the process “a nationwide bipartisan movement toward next-generation education reform.”
But eight of the 32 NCLB waivers granted to states are conditional, meaning those states have not entirely satisfied the administration’s requirements and part of their plans are under review.

No Child Left Behind has been used for leverage by the federal government since its inception. Even after the target year 2014, when all subgroups tested were supposed to test successfully, that leverage continued since the law gave the government the right to effectively punish failing schools.

As a law, No Child Left Behind had real teeth in it. The law’s standards and test requirements became a condition of receiving federal Title I grant money, the largest source of federal funding to state and local school districts. Title I grants are funneled through states to local school districts, primarily to help districts with high percentages of low-income families and disadvantaged children. For the fiscal year 2014, Title I funds amount to $14 billion of federal leverage. No Child Left Behind has been running alongside Race to the Top, another federal program which is only optional if a state wants to potentially leave behind its chunk of this new $4 billion program.

With minor variations, NCLB requirements were the same across the United States. Each state had to test annually. Each state had to show that students were improving. NCLB did not require a graduation exit exam. That would have been counterproductive, I suspect, since the plan underlying NCLB also included increasing graduation rates. The names of tests changed – and the tests themselves varied in their content – but the requirements were essentially similar. I apologize if this section is inescapably filled with numerical data. NCLB was a government program dedicated to a large amount of data collection, so there is no way to understand the program without spending a little time with the data.

Schools were required to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) or face increasingly severe penalties. Adequate Yearly Progress was determined by NCLB and was the minimum level of proficiency that school districts and schools were required to achieve each year. AYP did not remain a sitting target. Every year, school scores were expected to improve. To make AYP, a school and district also needed to meet the required participation rate and annual measurable objectives in language arts and math.

The below chart shows the original Alaska plan, which culminated in all students meeting or exceeding expectations on the state test 2013-2014.

Annual Measurable Objective (AMO)
AMO is the percent of students who must be proficient on the above exams as required by the state. Not only must the school as a whole meet the AMO, but each specified subgroup of students must also meet the AMO. The goal of NCLB was to have all students be proficient in language arts and math by 2013-2014. These are the AMO’s for Alaska by year and subject:

School Year                  AMO for Language                   AMO for Mathematics
Arts
2001-02                           64.03%                                         54.86%
2002-03                           64.03%                                         54.86%
2003-04                           64.03%                                         54.86%
2004-05                           71.48%                                         57.61%
2005-06                           71.48%                                         57.61%
2006-07                           71.48%                                         57.61%
2007-08                           77.18%                                         66.09%
2008-09                           77.18%                                         66.09%
2009-10                           77.18%                                         66.09%
2010-11                           82.88%                                         74.57%
2011-12                           88.58%                                         83.05%
2012-13                           94.28%                                         91.53%
2013-14                           100%                                            100%

Californian targets were originally set up so they would increase slowly at first and then would go up rapidly in 2007-08, at which point they were to continue to increase yearly by about 11 percentage points until 100% of Californian students met or exceeded state standards on the 2013-14 state test. (All national students were expected to meet or exceed expectations on their state’s standardized test in the year 2013-14.) The California schedule of Annual Measurable Objective increases was supposedly established with the belief that Californian schools would experience greater academic gains in later years after they had adjusted to issues such as “alignment of instruction with state content standards.”
(http://www.ed-data.k12.ca.us/articles/article.asp?title=understanding%20the%20ayp)

The above plan is so out of alignment with actual reality that I am filled with a deep, cynical admiration for those California’s leaders who were bold enough to put it on paper. My best guess is that California’s educational leaders knew they could not hit the required targets and so set their goals low at first so they could make NCLB goals in the beginning, hoping the whole program would go away by the time they were somehow supposed to achieve 11% improvement in a year and eventually have 100% of students passing the state test. Asking any state to improve test scores by a full 11% across multiple years is absurd. The odds of that state establishing Martian colonies are probably equally good.

Contrary to what some government leaders appear to believe, America’s teachers have not been sitting around scratching themselves and surfing the internet. Most have been teaching vigorously. That “11%” represents a huge improvement in scores, since the tests themselves get harder as the years progress and students must first learn the new, harder material before they can begin to tackle that 11%. The requirement essentially demanded that California’s students make over a year’s standard academic progress in one year over multiple years – including special education students, bilingual students, students who move frequently, and those students who are acknowledged slow learners.

Under NCLB, each school and district had to meet the annual objectives in order to make annual yearly progress targets. Further, NCLB demanded that all numerically significant subgroups meet targets, significant having been defined as at least 100 pupils or at least 50 students who make up 15% or more of the total school enrollment. These groups included up to eight possible ethnic groups, including “two or more races.” Racial/Ethnic: Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, Native American, Asian/Pacific Islander, and multi_ethnic; Economically Disadvantaged: Students on free or reduced lunch; Students with Disabilities: Students with IEPs; and Limited English Proficient students. Other groups required to hit targets were socioeconomically disadvantaged students, English-language learners and disabled students. If any one of these subgroups didn’t meet math and English targets, the school or district failed to make AYP. Subgroups of 20 or fewer were not considered for AYP determinations.

NCLB required that 95% students—and 95% of each significant subgroup—participate in each test. Absenteeism in only one subgroup could prevent the school or district from making AYP. Schools also needed to meet one more indicator: High schools were required to graduate at a certain percentage of students – for example, Alaska’s target was at least 55.58% of their students– while elementary and middle schools had to maintain an 85% attendance rate. The actual graduation targets varied. Colorado’s graduation rate target was 55.3 percent in 2002 with a planned target of 65 percent in 2014, while Maine started at 60 percent in 2002, planning progress to 75 percent in 2014. Several states amended their AYP definitions in 2006 and 2007 to permit “progress” toward the attainment of graduation targets, rather than actual attainment of those targets. (http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/disadv/nclb-accountability/nclb-accountability-final.pdf )

Consequences of not meeting AYP for Schools Receiving Title I Funds: Without going into tedious detail, first parents were alerted and the school had to make a plan to improve and seek outside help. If the situation continued the following year, the school was to notify parents. The school then needed to develop and implement a school improvement plan to submit to its district for approval. The district submitted the plan to state and county departments of education. (How many new government employees and/or contractors ended up working on these plans? I imagine a small country’s worth.) The school was required to provide supplemental services to students who could not hit the targets. If the situation continued for another year, the school was required to offer a choice of an alternative school if one was available.

At this point, the consequences begin to border on Draconian in nature:

Level 4 Corrective Actions
In addition to continuing all the requirements for Level 3, the district is required to take at least one of the following actions: replacement of staff who are relevant to the school not demonstrating AYP, implementation of a new curriculum, significantly decrease management authority at the school, appoint one or more outside experts to advise the school, extend for that school the length of the school year or school day, or restructure the internal organization of the school.
(Incidentally, I believe that provision involving lengthening the school year or day would be an effective remedy in many struggling schools, but that remedy is very seldom used due to the high costs involved.)

Level 5 Restructuring
In addition to continuing all the requirements for Level 4, the district is required to prepare a plan to carry out one of the following alternative governance arrangements: reopen the school as a public charter school, replace all or most of the staff who are relevant to the school not demonstrating AYP, enter into a contract with a private management company, transfer operation of the school to the department, if agreed to by the department, or any other major restructuring of the school’s governance arrangement. If the school remains in restructuring status the following year, the district must implement the restructuring plan at the beginning of the school year following the plan’s creation.
(http://www.asdk12.org/nclb/AYP/eed.asp: )

When NCLB arrived at the projected 100% year, America’s schools were not close to achieving the original targets. The federal government then gave “waivers” to states that could not make those impossible targets, waivers with a substantial number of strings attached. Nevertheless, by that time, with or without waivers, NCLB had legitimized standardized testing as a way of evaluating schools, teachers and American education as a whole. Data-driven instruction and teaching to the test had become the norm, and for the most part a de facto requirement.

To present a glimpse of the problem posed by this test-based approach, let’s consider one “failing” school that appeared to be doing an awesome job of educating its students. Lincoln school in Berwyn, Illinois increased test scores from 60% to 83% of students meeting or exceeding targets, all the while undergoing a change that added 25% more Hispanic students into the testing pool. Yet the school failed by government standards, year after year. Many of the best schools in the United States failed to make AYP and ended up on watch or warning lists. Certain subgroups historically underperform other subgroups academically — that’s practically the definition of special education — but the failure of a group will lead to the failure of a school.

Put simply and informally, I can find many cases that show the government requirements were completely laughable – but if you’re a teacher in a school that had been failing to meet improvement targets, those requirements are no laughing matter. Despite its superior performance, Lincoln was supposed to put in many hours on an improvement plan to submit to its district and to the government. My own school had to make such a plan. I spent many afternoons on a Building Leadership Committee during the 2010 – 2012 school years, working to meet government requirements for failing schools. I also spent numerous days out of the classroom helping to make a 79-point state plan designed to show we were addressing our NCLB failure. On those days, I was forced to leave my students with a sub – or worse, with no sub because so many teachers were out making improvement plans that the district did not have enough subs. On one of those first days of improvement a few years ago, our school had NO subs since the substitute pool had bypassed the middle school for the safer havens of elementary and high school education. I don’t know how many elementary and high school teachers also had no subs. I know that six teachers from my school were out with no one officially slated to take their classes.

Across America, in Illinois and other states, teachers and administrators have been missing class time to deal with the fallout from failing to hit targets. Let’s add that loss of instructional time to time directly sucked away by testing itself and related test prep. I was professionally developed out of the classroom during one of those Building Leadership Team years for about three school weeks. That’s one-twelfth of the entire 36 week students’ school year. A handful of coworkers were out with me on these many learning opportunities – their classes also in the hands of a coworker or sub.
I left behind my diverse classroom so I could be professionally developed. On those days, little or no “differentiation” occurred, since my sub plans were one-packet-fits-all, with a note to the sub that students could work together in groups. I hoped the sub would actually use my sub materials. I hoped the stronger students would help the weaker students. I hoped the weaker students would think about the readings and not simply mindlessly copy from academically stronger friends. On bad days, with no subs, I hoped the coworker who took my class would use my sub materials. Doubled-up classes are distracting and distracted. It’s tough to present two lessons at once.

Again, I ended up teaching exactly the same material to my many different students, and without the being able to supervise their efforts. While I can’t exactly call these days lost, I certainly consider them substandard learning opportunities. For that matter, time spent on an improvement plan cannot be dedicated to perfecting the next day’s lesson. All across America, teachers and administrators have had similar experiences — especially teachers and administrators in financially- and academically-disadvantaged districts.

One ugly underbelly to NCLB that seldom has seemed to be discussed struck me often in the last few years. The fall-out from this law hit the kids who most needed help the hardest. Even when financially prosperous districts were forced to create improvement plans, those districts had the funds to hire help to prepare plans without compromising administrative oversight in other areas. Those districts could find subs for teachers who had to help with the improvement plans. NCLB affected education in all schools, but its effects were felt far more intensely in schools with very limited resources. Poor schools, with no budget for adding new staff, could not delegate academic and instructional activities to others in order to focus on meeting government requirements. Frequently, in our least fortunate zip codes, academic and instructional activities were sacrificed outright so that limited personnel could fulfill mandatory legal requirements that trumped the actual teaching of children. Time was stolen from children in these financially-disadvantaged districts as administrators and teachers trudged to meetings designed to “improve” already beleaguered schools.

The losers were the children left behind.

We are well into the school year now. While some districts still start after Labor Day, most have been pushing back into August. A number have pushed back into July. The more days before that test, the better, administrations seem to believe. I’ll suggest that probably depends on the quality of school air conditioning, but that’s another issue.

Homework has become a huge issue on a number of fronts. How much homework? What kind of homework? How do we grade that homework? How much do we count that homework toward the final grade? Should all teachers give the same homework? How much differentiation should be allowed/required? How do we convince students to do the homework?

That last question’s a toughy, depending on your district and situation. In some districts, the problem only arises in pockets. In this college-bound district where I live, one of our high schools made the U.S. News and World Report list of 100 best high schools a couple of years ago, based on the fact that nearly 100% of graduates attended college. I can attest to the fact that children in that school did their homework and groups of them even sometimes pulled all-nighters. By 4 A.M. giddy giggles, frustrated objections and clattering pans would drive me to earplugs. Yet in the district where I worked, I knew teachers who had all but given up on homework due to the poor return rate.

School culture becomes a huge factor in school and even class homework return percentages. This post should have been finished in August or September, but better late than never. If the inbox has been light lately, I’d pull out the big rewards, assuming you are not straightjacketed by inflexible administrative requirements. For example, you could try something like, “If I get 90% of homework papers for the week, then we will have a Christmas party.” I’d do the classwide parent call, too — at least for all students who are slacking off. Consider lunch or after school detentions to finish homework. In some cases, before school detentions may be possible. Both carrots and sticks can be helpful.

Eduhonesty: You can’t let this go now. My guess is many teachers have been trying homework completion interventions for weeks. You might even be tempted to walk away in some cases. Please hang in there. If you have not tried this yet, you may succeed with a nightly homework log. This log requires parents to sign nightly after students complete the day’s homework. Regular calls or texts to parents will back up homework logs and other interventions. Texts obviously save time when possible. A quick evening texting session to concerned parents only takes a few minutes and will up completion rates. Rewards at the end of the week for students who have turned in all assignments will also boost completion rates.

Good luck.

P.S. If you have homework completion problems in your classes, I recommend against assignments over Winter Break except for possible extra credit. The problem with uncompleted or “lost” assignments or packets rests in habits that are not only not established, but even undermined. Vacation packets are less likely to come back than nightly homework — and the message conveyed when only a minority of kids arrive with finished work does not help your long-term efforts to reel in the daily homework. I recommend generally against any assignments that you are certain most students will not complete. We don’t want to build bad habits — and low-return assignments can do that over time.

Holiday extra credit assignments can work. Kids like extra credit. (Unfortunately, some of them even try to rely on extra credit. Again, another issue.) You don’t lose face when groups of students don’t turn in the extra credit, but you may prevent learning loss in students who put effort into their winter break reinforcement activities.

P.S. For those who may be worried about the picture above, I promise every student in that classroom celebrated Christmas. No religious groups were excluded.

(For teachers, parents and anyone interested.)

What is something that made you learn today?

Yesterday’s post was intended to help new and tired teachers find critical thinking questions. Sometimes I think the emphasis on critical thinking has become a little twisted, as teachers are pushed to ask complex questions before students are ready to make connections. You cannot think critically until you have amassed a store of background knowledge.

But I love critical thinking questions when they work. This one question appeals to me because its form leads to metacognitive exploration. What MADE you learn?

The question is not, “What did you learn today?” That question is too easy. “I learned the Earth goes around the sun.” Well, yes, that’s good and the conversation can take off from there. But when I ask what made my children or students learn, I open up new possibilities. The answer might be, “I had to get ready for my test Friday,” another toss-off answer. That answer can be leveraged into a discussion about how quizzes and tests reinforce learning, helping learning to make its way into long-term memory. I might get lucky and get an answer like, “I ate breakfast and I was a lot more awake in the morning.” That’s an answer that can help a student for the rest of his or her life. I might get a specific response about a lesson: “I liked how you walked around the room with the globe to show us the seasons. That helped me understand.” This question helps us understand where a lesson worked best. If we listen to the silence, we may also learn where the lesson didn’t work. If nobody mentions my globe walk, that activity probably did not give me much educational bang for my buck. Maybe I did not explain enough as I circled the room.

Eduhonesty: The blog’s gone over 12,000 users and I wonder about you guys, who somehow found the top-secret blog of less-gloom-and-doom-lately. You must be interested in education in general, because these posts hardly carry a coherent theme. Micro posts compete for attention with macro posts; critical thinking appears a few days after budgetary issues.

(From four years ago in a school that definitely had budgetary challenges. The little TV was a donation from a friend.)

Thanks for reading, anyway. I know from traffic that people particularly like classroom tips so I will try to keep these coming.

(For new teachers and others.)

I’m afraid Mentoring Minds no longer makes this box. I can’t find it on their website, www.mentoringminds.com. You might look for a used set online. Based on my green box above, I’d consider giving their Critical Thinking Educator Wheel a shot. On those tired days when the coffee cannot seem to cut through the fog, a tool like my box or the critical thinking wheel will do your critical thinking on critical thinking for you.

Eduhonesty: Cue cards can be used to make good opening activities. Leafing through questions may inspire you to expand your lesson in unexpected directions. One great advantage to my cue cards was that I could pass them out to students based on individual levels of understanding, passing easier cards to students who needed more scaffolding and support.

If you don’t want to spend money on another classroom aid, you could also create your own sentence strips for critical thinking questions. Brainstorming questions could be a fun lesson with opportunities to discuss metacognition, to get students thinking about their own thinking processes. I would laminate my sentence strips for long-term classroom use.