Anecdotal Notes: Still crazy after all these years!

Anecdotal notes-- AAAARGH! You would think that after 30 years of teaching, I would have this beast figured out! I want to capture the important stuff about kids as it happens, but I don't want to spend a lot of time doing it. I also need my system to be organized and easy to use. I want to track data about individuals as well as easily identify small groups with similar needs. Is there one system that can do it all?

I've tried the notebook approach: Each student gets a page in a notebook, and I take notes on that page when I confer or get a new piece of data (like a standardized test score or a reading goal) or have a parent conference. That works pretty well if I'm only going to focus on the individual and his/her progress. It's much harder to see trends across the class or pull together small groups.

I've tried an iPad app called Confer. It seemed like it could hold individual info as well as do the kind of sorting/grouping I was looking for. It also promised a way to match student information with the CCSS standards to track progress and help with standards-based grading. However, the set up took so long, inputting the CCSS and students, and typing on the iPad is so slow for me, that I abandoned that method as well.

For several years I used a card system that was housed in a folder. Each student had a card, but unlike the notebook idea, the cards were taped onto the interior sides of the folder in a tiered manner, so that one overlapped the other, leaving a small portion visible at the bottom. Student names were written on the visible part, and I could use that space to track how often I met with a student. Again, this was good for individual progress, and a better system for making sure I was getting to all students in a timely manner, but still not so good at pulling together groups of common needs. Also, handwriting is slow work!

So this year I am back to technology. Our tech coach suggested using Google Forms as a system. It's not slick and it's not fancy, but so far it's working out. I have a form that lists student names as a "checklist" of answers to "question", a list of my unit names as the checklist answers to my next "question", an open text box to answer the question of Notes, and a final open text box for the question of Items for Next Meeting. As I confer or get data, I select a student name and unit from the checkboxes, quickly type in my conference notes, and capture what next steps will be. This data, along with the date, is gathered in Responses, which can be viewed as a Google spreadsheet.

The advantage of the spreadsheet is in the sorting and filtering it can do that the notebook and flip cards can't. If I want to see all notes on a student, I can sort names alphabetically, and all responses for the student are clustered together.

If I want to see which students need work on their close reading, for example, I can filter out only the Short Story Reading unit, and even find all responses that have the words "close reading" in them. Voila! A small group with similar needs!

So far I don't have many notes on kids because we are just getting started in school. I wonder if the spreadsheet will eventually get messy or bulky and hard to use. I may need to have one for semester 1 and one for semester 2. However, it has fulfilled a lot of needs so far.

Another tech tool suggested by the tech coach was Evernote. I haven't done much exploring with it yet because I'm kind-of into Google Forms right now. So I'm keeping that option in my back pocket as I see how Forms plays out.

What is your anecdotal note systems? Does yours handle multiple classes and large numbers of kids? Can you track individuals as well as filter/sort for small groups?

On-demand Performance Assessments vs. The Grading Load

One of the things I love about teaching writing with a Workshop approach is the opportunity to support students as they are in the midst of independent projects. This just-in-time teaching allows for differentiation, re-teaching, stretching, and confirming. There are often “ah ha!” moments. Workshop also allows the opportunity for creating a community of learners: peers helping each other, sharing with partners, small groups, or the whole class. Taking a risk in such a supported classroom feels do-able, and students make big growth. Often as I grade final projects, I can see the tracks of my teaching—both whole group and individual—reflected in student work. This is very satisfying as a teacher.

CC0 image from pixabay website

On the other hand, as I grade final projects, I wonder how much of the work is their own. How well can they actually do the things I am asking them to do without all the support they get? Where is the line between scaffolding the learning so students can grow, and expecting them to show their learning independently?

Our new units from the TCRWP staff recommend on-demand writing both before and after a unit is taught. Before-unit writing allows the teacher to see what skills students already have and areas for growth. After-unit writing shows what students have learned from the unit. In-between these on-demand writing pieces is the workshop: self-selected independent projects supported by directed teaching, individual conferring, and peer sharing.

Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins advocate for performance assessments that show transfer of learning goals. In an Understanding by Design (UbD) white paper (ASCD, 2012), they explain the third of their seven key tenets: “Understanding is revealed when students autonomously make sense of and transfer their learning through authentic performance. Six facets of understanding—the capacity to explain, interpret, apply, shift perspective, empathize, and self-assess—can serve as indicators of understanding”.  The words “autonomously” and “apply” jump out at me. They seem to be agreeing with the TCRWP staff that on-demand performance is the only way to see true understanding and learning.

So what do those ideas mean for me as a teacher? And how does grading intersect with these ideas? Although ideally I’d like to teach and assess without putting a grade on a piece of work, I know that is not the reality of school. Grades are supposed to show how well students are achieving the learning standards. We are obligated to communicate a student’s achievement on report cards, and at our school, that means assigning a grade to their work.

If I take McTighe & Wiggins’ and TCRWP’s suggestions and meld them with my grading obligation, ideally my unit should look like this:

1. Before-unit on-demand writing to pre-assess student learning. This would be used by the teacher to inform upcoming teaching, as well as by students to set learning goals.
2. Three to four weeks of workshop during which students work on self-selected independent projects supported by teaching and feedback.  This would be filled with formative feedback as students practice their new skills within the supported environment.
3. After-unit on-demand writing to assess mastery of learning standards and transfer of understanding. This would be a summative grade that goes on the report card.

I have a few questions about this “ideal” unit assessment scenario. First and foremost, I wonder if students will put their full effort into their weeks-long processed workshop piece knowing that it doesn’t “count” toward their grade. Right now, most students will pour over their writing product with a fine-tooth comb, comparing their work to the rubric descriptors, asking questions of peers and me to fix it up to meet the standard. What’s the point in putting in all that effort if that piece of work doesn’t “count” toward a grade?

Second, what if the post-unit on-demand assessment falls on a bad day for the student? This is one of the big caveats to relying on standardized testing data to define student ability: it’s just a snapshot of one day, and maybe that was a bad day for that student. How can one day’s work define the learning of a whole unit? What if the students know more than the assessment allows them to show?

Third, who has time to score three pieces of writing for every unit? I spend hours evaluating student writing as it is, and I’m not doing all the on-demand pieces. I’ve asked this question in workshops, and get the answer that the on-demands (especially the pre-assessment) shouldn’t take all that long because the point is to just get a “sense” of where the student is, not examine it with a fine-tooth comb. Well, maybe that works in elementary where writing is brief, but give an 8th grader 45 minutes to write an on-demand piece and I get two pages typed—single spaced, size 12 font. Just reading the piece takes at least 5 minutes, and then another 5 minutes or so to score, multiplied times 45 students, and I’m looking at a minimum of 7.5 hours. If I’m assigning a summative grade, as I would for the post-unit on-demand assessment, I would probably double that because I do need to examine the writing with a fine-tooth comb.

Could there be a compromise? What if…

1. Only the student uses the pre-assessment on-demand piece to make goals for the unit? Once the student shares those goals with me, I can use them to guide my conferring, and possibly whole class instruction as well if enough students have the same goals. Once the unit gets rolling, I would focus on the work in front of us and not the on-demand anyway when I am conferring with students. This would take one of the 7.5-grading-hour commitments off my plate.
2. The processed piece and the post-unit on-demand each count 50% of the summative unit grade? This would give enough weight to the processed piece that students would want to work hard on it over the three-four week unit, and also show what students can do independently.  It would honor the long-term work as well as the one-day snapshot. I’m still looking at double the grading time, though. That’s still a problem.

It seems there is a disconnect between the “ideal” and the reality of the day-to-day life of a teacher. I’m not sure how to resolve this. Any thoughts out in the blogosphere? How do you handle on-demand assessments? How do you find time to evaluate multiple pieces of writing for the same set of learning standards?

Using Booksource's Classroom Organizer with My Classroom Library

Today I want to put a plug in for a great new tool I've started using with my classroom library: Booksource's Classroom Organizer. This is a free book check-out system that also generates handy teacher reports.

All set up and reports can be managed via the teacher page:

The first thing to do to get things set up is to import your classroom inventory using an Excel spreadsheet. You can choose which categories to include for the books. It's easy to add additional titles individually once the big bulk of the inventory is imported.

Then you need to add students to your list so they have permission to check out (and check in) books electronically. They can do this from the student page:

Admittedly, the graphic is a bit elementary for eighth grade, but the tool is worth it. So far, students have been very responsible about using the system independently (once I posted all the login information in two or three places around the room). One super nice feature is that students will get an email every three weeks reminding them that they have a particular book checked out. This frees me up from looking at the hand-scrawled sign-out paper and trying to monitor that myself. Often just this little reminder is enough to get them to return the book to the library.

I haven't used the teacher reports much yet, since we've only been in school a month. Here are the options









This is my favorite report, Current Books Checked Out. This also gets sent to me automatically via email every three weeks so I can keep track.











This is what the Student Checkout Detail looks like for one prolific reader. I can see he is a dystopian reader mostly, but graphic novels also catch his attention.

I've been very pleased with the hand-off nature of the Classroom Organizer system. There is still an honor system in place for kids to actually do the check-in/check-out process instead of just walking out with a book. But it's no worse that it was before. The Classroom Org. system takes a little time to get set up, but their tech support people were super helpful when I ran into a glitch. For teachers who are trying to track students' reading lives, levels of text complexity, variety of genres, or volume, I highly recommend this system.

Jumping into Scoring On-Demand Assessments

I am about to jump with both feet into the hard work of analyzing student work to make my teaching better. This work is made harder because I am using a new tool, the rubrics in the Units of Study in Argument, Information, and Narrative Writing (UoSW) for grade 8 (Heinemann, 2014). These rubrics are written as a continuum of skills along categories that match the CCSS writing standards' performance indicators. There are categories for leads, endings, transition words, organization, elaboration, craft, mechanics, and an overall category. Although these are things I evaluated using our modified Six Traits rubric for the past four years, the wording is different and open to interpretation in places. 

Rubric excerpt from Units of Study in Argument, Information, and Narrative Writing (Heinemann, 2014)

I now have 43 on-demand pieces of argument writing to analyze before we jump into our literary essay unit in a couple of weeks. Because the rubric is so unfamiliar, however, I am looking at this stack with trepidation. I feel unready to tackle this task without a better understanding of what I'm supposed to look for. I need a plan.

I already tried out the rubric once with my department team members, as we collaboratively scored a seventh grade student sample. It didn't go well. We had so many questions like, "How is 'clearly articulated' different from 'logical' evidence?" "The rubric jumps from one thing to another. Is it supposed to be a progression?" We were definitely not comfortable with the tool, nor did we come to any clear understanding of how to use it with any grading consistency. 

I think I need do one more "training" exercise before I try to score my own students' writing. The UoSW provides annotated teacher-written exemplars that meet the grade level standards. I think I need to sit down with the grade 6, grade 7, and grade 8 exemplars as well as the rubrics, and try to match them up. Where the annotation says this is the "clearly articulated" evidence, what does that look like? How can I see it in my students' writing as well? I want to have all three levels in front of me because I know my students will be all over the place depending on their past experiences and their developmental levels. Even my better writers may be at a sixth grade level in some areas, and my struggling writers may reach the eighth grade level in others. In general, though, I expect I will see mostly seventh grade writing, which makes sense because we are just starting eighth grade!

By getting a clearer image of what the rubric descriptors look like in a writing sample, I hope to do a better, more consistent job scoring my students' writing. I also hope that once I get on a roll, I will start being more efficient with my time. I expect the first few (5? 10? 20?) will take about 20 minutes each as I work through the descriptors and make judgments about what I'm seeing in front of me. Getting that down to 10 minutes each would be much more comfortable.

In the end, I will have a bank of data that can lead me into making better teaching decisions during the literary essay writing unit itself. I can plan whole class mini-lessons to target general needs. I can plan small group work where I see clusters of need. I can confer with individuals to move them from where they are to where they need to go. I don't need to guess or wait until mid-unit when I look over drafts. 

I can also ask students to use this writing sample as a way to set some goals to work on during the unit, identifying a few areas to really pay attention to and work to improve. The process of reflecting on oneself as a writer, identifying needs and goals, and working to improve is an act of self-actuality. It puts the responsibility to learn and grow as a writer actively on the students' shoulders, instead of passively waiting for the teacher to tell them what to do. Isn't this the goal of becoming a lifelong learner?

So. Big work ahead, but good work. Important work. Work that will strengthen my teaching and strengthen student learning. Deep breath! 

Matching Data, Kids, and Books

My professional goal this year is to set up my classroom library as a teaching tool to support students into reading more complex texts. I have already done some work on this (and blogged about it): completed inventory with guided reading/lexile levels indicated when available, book ladders developed in several genres based on TCRWP lists, and a home reading expectation with regular accountability check-ins. A couple weeks ago I took the next step.

I was home for a sick day, one of those days where you're not all that sick, but you know going into school would be a very bad idea. I decided I would use my long quiet day to do some work with my new book ladders. I had three data points to work with: January MAP Reading data (especially suggested Lexile range), January reading log via Shelfari (www.shelfari.com) which allowed me to identify the book(s) students read during the month, and my knowledge of the kids at this point in the year.

After I captured the MAP data and the Shelfari books, I took a look at my book ladders to make a suggestion for a next book to read. This is where my knowledge of the kids came in. 

image from goodreads.com

I noticed one student who scored relatively low on the MAP was reading books like From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (Level S, Lexile 700) and Charlotte's Web (Lexile 680). His MAP score suggested he should read books in the 897-1040 range. It seemed to me that he was a kid who is not very confident in his reading, and is relying on books he'd read in the past, or felt comfortable to him. If I look purely at the Lexiles of these books, I notice he's actually not too far off of his recommended range (at the lower end). So putting books in his hand that are not a huge jump up in complexity (to maintain the comfort level), but that are more 8th grade appropriate, seemed the way to go. Since From the Mixed Up Files is a mystery, I thought he might like to keep going with that genre. I suggested he read Silent to the Bone (also by E. L. Konigsburg), which is Level V, Lexile 810. This gives him a jump up in level and maturity of text, but keeps him with a familiar author and genre. 

image from paperbackswap.com

On the other end of the spectrum, I noticed one of my best readers had been reading Scorpia Rising (Lexile 780), and I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic (unrated). His MAP suggested he read books in the 1275-1425 range. My knowledge of this boy along with this data tells me that he is a huge soccer fan, reads nonfiction as well as fiction, is interested in current events because we had a long conversation about Nelson Mandela's recent death, and would prefer to do other more active things than read. My suggestion for him was Nelson Mandela's biography No Easy Walk to Freedom (X/990). Although the guided reading level is low for him, the Lexile gets him closer to his suggested range. I also know that he is not going to independently read something that is at his suggested high Lexile level, usually either classic texts or primary source documents. He needs something interesting or he'll put it down in a hurry.

I did this for each student, and sent each of them an email with my suggestion. A few wrote back and said they'd already read it. Others thanked me and said they'd been looking for something new to read. And for the next few days, books were flying out of my classroom library.

Granted, this process took me several hours. I don't have the time to do this every month. However, if I can keep some of my lower kids reading (priority #1) more complex books (priority #2), this should support their progress across the year. In addition, if I can help my higher level kids read books they find interesting AND challenging (most books at the 8th grade level are around the 700-800 lexile level), their more advanced reading skills can be challenged as well.