Data Archives - Samantha Mosher

Student Centered IEP Meetings in Action

I am so very proud of all of my students. With the exception of a few, they all participated in their end-of-year ILP meetings, and most of them led or co-led their meetings. Some were nervous. Some became embarrassed or flustered and needed to use our agreed upon signal to have me take over. But most of them were rock stars (yes, this is a clinical term). I am declaring student centered IEP meetings (with the help of our digital portfolios) a success, even if there are a few things I’d change next year.

Based on what I saw during the student centered IEP meetings and some responses I got to the survey I did after the meetings were done, I came to a few conclusions:

The 6th graders definitely did better than the 7th graders with leading the meetings
Students who made digital portfolios and practiced self-reflection all year did better than those classes where I didn’t try out the digital portfolio
The better the students understood the purpose of their digital portfolios, the better they did at the meetings
Preparing for the meetings helped students to be able to both identify and understand their goals
The kids who are the most outgoing weren’t necessarily the ones who were the most comfortable in the meetings.

Digital Portfolios to Support the Meetings

While my 6th graders are, in general, a more self-reflective group than my 7th graders, I really think that the digital portfolios helped to support their self-reflection. This helped them to have more successful student centered IEP meetings. My 6th graders spoke confidently about their goals and their progress, showing examples from their digital portfolios. They were able to describe why we decided on their new goals and where they wanted to be the following year. Next year, I plan on doing digital portfolios with all of my students, and the other Learning Specialist will do the same. I’ve even convinced a few of the ELL teachers to try them with their students as well.

Skills for Public Speaking, Especially with Adults

I tried to scaffold the presentation portion of it as much as possible, but I think it was still a little intimidating to present to a room full of adults. All of my students have done some work with public speaking, but most of it has been in front of peers, rather than adults. For the most part, students found the organizers that we used to prepare for the meetings helpful, but I think I need to structure the other preparation activities differently. We tried role playing, but it tended to get a little silly. I think next year I need to set up very specific expectations about behavior and participation. I also made the mistake of assuming that the talkative, outgoing students wouldn’t need as much support in presenting to their parents and teachers. For these students, while they may be very comfortable with talking, talking about themselves and their progress can be daunting. I need to give all of my students more support next year.

Understanding Goals

It was pretty shocking to me how little understanding most of my students had their specific goals and why they existed. Most of my students told me at the end of the year that they knew what their new goals were and knew some ways we’d be working towards them next year. At the beginning of this past year, most of my students couldn’t identify their goals and couldn’t tell me why they had specific goals. Now that they’re more informed, I’m hoping that they’ll be more motivated to participate in actively working to achieve their goals.

I’m excited to plan for implementing digital portfolios and student centered IEP meetings next year and I’m sure it will be even more successful now that I’ve tried it out once.

Getting Started with Digital Portfolios

Front page of one of our digital portfolios — The front page of one student’s digital portfolio.

This year I’m piloting digital portfolios with my M2 (grade 6) class. I noticed last year that there wasn’t a lot of communication between the Learning Support program and parents. There aren’t really grades, and there’s the occasional email, but more often than not, no work goes home. Most of the work that parents do see are the results scaffolding and specialized graphic organizers, and other supplements and complements to classroom instruction. Last year, in my first year in the position, with the help of my principal we added more transparency by creating learning plans for students that contained goals for the skills that would be addressed during the school year (I know, for those of you in public schools this is SOP, but it something that seems to be slowly becoming a part of international schools). I thought this was great, but I wanted to do more. Then I got connected to Matt Renwick through Twitter and his blog, and started reading his book Digital Student Portfolios. I decided to create digital portfolios that were primarily designed to show growth, but that could be used to showcase certain pieces of work or activities that students were particularly proud of. I wanted to use digital portfolios as an opportunity to create a dialogue with students and parents about growth, and to continue to build a culture of self-reflection for learning in my classroom.

The first challenge I faced was finding the right platform to use to create the digital portfolios. My school has a pretty strict “no use of 13 and over programs and apps by students under 13” policy, so Evernote, the platform Matt discusses in his book, was out. The school’s Tech Integrator and I discussed Google Sites, Blogger (both part of our school’s Google Apps for Education subscription) or Weebly. I ended up dismissing Blogger because I wouldn’t be able to house several blogs on the same page, and I knew that teaching students how to effectively use tags would take a while. After making two sample portfolios, one in Weebly and one in Google Sites, I decided that Weebly would work best for my purposes and be easiest for the students to use. So far, I would recommend this as a platform.

Benefits

Weebly is really easy to use. It’s uses a drag and drop system to add pictures, buttons, URLs, and HTML code. I even taught my students how to embed Google Docs in their Weebly blogs (something I had thought would be easier with Google Sites).
Not having the easy-embed function from Google Sites led to a mini-lesson on HTML, which the students seemed to enjoy.
The school’s educator account provides some measure of privacy and security for students. Their sites are password protected.
If students forget passwords, etc they are all managed by our Instructional Technology department.
It’s easy for students to personalize and make their own.
It’s easy to share with parents and for them to navigate.
Creating individual blogs for each goal allows us easily see progress on individual goals, and the most recent activity (that, I hope, represents the students’ current progress toward the goal) is at the top of the page.
The blog format allows me, their classroom teachers, their parents, and, if they choose, their peers, to comment on the work that they share and ask questions about it.

Drawbacks

Weebly is extremely customizable, which is a good thing. I want students to take ownership of their portfolios I had to get through a few classes of students playing around with the design of their website, which was OK, but often what they thought of as a “good design” made their message difficult to understand. I think the next time I do this, I need to spend a bit more time on the front end integrating instruction on how design can influence the audience’s ability to understand our message, maybe using specific websites (possibly even my own) as examples.
Although there is a way for the student and I to be co-owners of a Weebly site, the Tech Integrator and I haven’t been able to make it work yet. This is something that would have been much easier with Google Sites or with Blogger, but I think the ease of use more than makes up for this.
The one blog per goal set up makes it more difficult to use tags to see connections between assignments and activities that match up to multiple goals.
Next year, I need to do a better job reviewing the difference between personal online communication and professional online communication (particularly editing one’s work before posting it online–see the spelling error above).

Overall, I have been completely blown away by all the things that I could do with a digital portfolio that I wouldn’t have been able to do with a traditional portfolio. I had just assumed that a digital portfolio would be a substitution for a physical portfolio or it would be an augmentation, adding some functional improvement, but not significantly different from the physical version. I am, however, starting to see that digital portfolios are really modifications of traditional portfolios, allowing my students, their parents, and me to do things that weren’t possible with the original paper format. I’m excited to continue our work and I’ll keep you updated as I keep working with the students on building their portfolios.

Have you used digital portfolios? What have been your successes? Learning experiences?

Gut Feelings Versus Data

I was struck by the feedback that one participant gave Pooja Patel and I on our workshop last week:

Please do another workshop on that is on data. A lot of teachers around me reacted negatively when you talk about data. They said they “just know” what their students need and don’t need the data. I think a lot of teachers don’t understand why it is important.

I would love to do another workshop about data–both qualitative and quantitative–and how we really use it in the classroom. Not because I’m into” big data”, and not because I think we need to quantify everything a student does. In fact, I generally find qualitative data to be a much more powerful tool–Matt Renwick did a great post on that here. I want to do a workshop because data-driven instruction is a really powerful method that we as teachers have in our teaching toolbox, and I get annoyed that this has become synonymous with quantifying everything (although–full disclosure: I work at an international school, so many of the the testing and quantitative data pressures faced by my public school colleagues aren’t things that I have to deal with). Formative assessment, on-going diagnostic assessment, little tiny observations we make during the day and put together to create a big picture of a student’s progress–they all help teachers to make informed decisions about instruction. Also I’ve heard from a lot of teachers, both at school, in my graduate course, and at the workshop that they rely on “gut feelings” to decide on a groupings, next steps, and interventions. But are our guts the best way to make decisions like these?

Let’s deconstruct this idea of a “gut feeling”. Sometimes when I’m first articulating ideas about what a student needs or how she should be grouped in the classroom, I’ve made all sorts of informal observations here and there, I’ve looked at some work samples, but I haven’t really fully analyzed anything yet. I might have a “gut feeling” about what’s going on with that student–probably because I’m an experienced teacher and diagnostician and I’m already starting to make sense of the qualitative data that I’ve gathered, but I can’t really put it into a coherent statement with specific examples or data to support my “feeling”. And, in my experience, this is what a lot of experienced teachers mean when they say that they “just know” or that their “gut tells” them. But here’s the thing about my gut feeling–it’s not a fully articulated plan or idea. It’s not fleshed out, and, generally, as I begin to explore that feeling it starts to become more nuanced, and sometimes it ends up being the complete opposite of what my feeling was initially. And sometimes I was completely on target. Which is awesome. But it’s certainly not all the time. I’m probably right just as much as I’m wrong.

That said, sometimes my feeling is much less about the bits and pieces of qualitative data that I’m beginning to make sense of, and more about my preconceived notions about a student. Sometimes it’s the Halo Effect and sometimes it’s something else. It’s not really right, and it’s not really good practice, but it happens. It’s happened to me and sometimes it still happens (and, no, I’m not proud of it, just trying to be honest), and it’s probably happened to you too. We’re human. And that’s OK. But we do need to acknowledge that sometimes these other things that aren’t data about student performance to influence these feelings, and that those other things might not bring us to what’s best for a student. That is why we can’t just stop at a gut feeling. We need to really look at all of the sources of that feeling and turn it into a strong idea that’s supported with evidence.

So how do we coach teachers into moving from “feeling” to “thinking”? I’m really not sure. I think some of it is becoming more educated–especially at the middle level–about qualitative data (more on that next week). What is it? How do we analyze it? And remembering that teaching is a craft and a skill. As teachers, we don’t need to immediately know what’s going on with kids from some sort of magical intuition. If it comes down to our gut feelings versus data, we need to look at both. Sometimes that feeling means something else needs to be explored, but it shouldn’t be the only way we make decisions.