Hapara

On Thursday I attended a training session about Hapara. Hapara is essential for any school that is heavily using Google, especially chromebooks. It is an app that can be added to your Google Chrome web browser. In addition, there is also a Hapara extension that is added to Chrome to allow it to work better with the app. Hapara runs in the background on every student's chrome account (they don't even know its there). Then, Hapara's teacher dashboard allows any teacher to have access to any student's Google Drive. When assignments are completed as a Google Doc, but not shared with the teacher, the teacher doesn't have to email the student and wait for them to share it. They can just go into their Drive and grab the assignment, or see if its complete. The teacher can also make comments in the assignment that can serve as valuable feedback for the student.

Hapara also gives teachers the ability to view whatever the students are viewing. If the students are using their Chromebook to check Facebook, the teacher can send them an anonymous message that pops up on their screen, such as "Get back to work!" Furthermore, the teacher can go ahead and close the Facebook tab in the student's browser and open a new tab for the website they're supposed to be using.

There are a few catches, though. If the students learn about the extension and app, they could disable it or remove it. One teacher said she had been using it for several years, and the students never figured that out. The students also have to be signed into their school Google account for it to work. It can't monitor their personal Google account.

The lesson: technology brings new challenges, but it also brings new opportunities. Never before could students access the class' resources or their own assignments from anywhere. There is no more "I left my homework at home." The dog can't eat the Cloud. Hapara helps us use all the benefits of technology in the classroom while minimizing the downsides.

Meet the Parents

On Wednesday night, York had an open house, where all the parents come in the evening to follow in their son or daughter's footsteps. They are given their kid's schedule and spend 6 minutes in each of their kid's classes. We put a PowerPoint together for each of our two preps - chem and honors chem - to show to the parents. The PowerPoint was made easy with the Google Chrome "Explain and Send" extension. It allows you to take a screenshot of your screen, crop it, and mark it up with circles, arrows and text to highlight the important parts of a webpage.

Luckily, I didn't have to do a polygraph test.

Megan used the entire 6 minutes to talk about her background (and I introduced myself as well), what we do in class each day, how the students are graded, and where online resources are. There is a lot to cover and only a few minutes to do it, so you have to think about what is important for the parents to hear. I would guess that the two things they care about most are 1) how can they follow up with their kid and help them stay on top of assignments and 2) where can they find the resources if their son or daughter misses class or loses a worksheet. These were the two things we focused on.

Let's Stop and Think a Minute

In a nutshell, good teachers think about what they are doing; bad teachers do something because they either did it last year or because everyone else is doing it. I'm surrounded with good teachers.

The Chem teachers at York began a new routine this year: daily reflections on that day's objective (see the link below). Each lesson has at least one objective - the key concept or skill for the lesson. At the end of the day, we wanted students to write down a reflection about how well they understand that concept or can do that skill. The idea was that this will act as a journal of sorts and give the students a snapshot of their progress as they look back on the lessons come test time. However, its also part of their progress grade, which presents us with a dilemma. Is it fair and to give the students a grade on their opinion of their own understanding? This would mean the overconfident student gets a higher grade just because he thinks he knows it all.

We needed to stop and get back to our original goal: do we want this to serve the students as a tool to help them study and learn the material (in which case it shouldn't be graded), or do we want this to be an assessment for us to gauge the students learning prior to the test (in which case it should be graded)?

I think we found some middle ground. We discussed replacing daily reflections with a end-of-the-section reflection in which we can gauge the students' understanding of the overall section and how all the daily lessons and objectives fit together. We still need to work out the kinks, which we'll discuss more tomorrow.

Sixth Sense

Today I write about a really good strategy for classroom management, which means it didn't come from me. To give a little context, one student's brand new shoes got stolen last Friday. Based on when the shoes were missing and last seen, and what students were coming in and out of the room at the time, one of the teachers had it narrowed down to one or two kids. One student in particular had been testing the waters for a while, seeing how much he could get away with. He was confronted, a police report was filed, and he had coughed up a pair of shoes by Monday.

Now if he was in my class, I don't know how I would have handled it from there. The experienced teachers have a sixth sense about this stuff. The thief's teacher had been noticing from day 1 that this student is an attention seeker in a rather rude and disruptive way. She was explaining her strategy from here on out: ignore all his attempts at negative attention and emphasize positive feedback for the rest of the class. Within a day, she is already seeing that his demeanor is beginning to shift. He wants to be a part of the class, like everyone else that is getting attention and praise from the teacher. He is learning how to do that in a positive way.

Flipping Things Around

This post is a little late - writing on Monday about last Friday. I haven't written much about our one section of Honors Chemistry, so I thought now would be a good time. Honors Chem at York is what we call "flipped." Instead of spending class time teaching the lesson and then sending students home to struggle through the homework on their own, we reverse the order of things. For homework, the students watch and take notes on a "Screencast," which is a recording of a teacher explaining the material. This opens class time up for students to do the actual work associated with the lesson - when teachers are there to correct misconceptions, answer questions, and check for understanding. It works with some subjects (such as math) more than others (such as English). This format creates a large amount of front end work on the teacher's part to create and record each screencast, but once its done, it can be used for several sections of the same class for several years and puts most of the responsibility to learn on the students.

This brings me to my next thought. Because we do a lot of flipped instruction for the Honors students - students that are more motivated and responsible than your average high schooler - it easily leads into thinking that these kids teach themselves. To some extent, this is true. They do take more ownership of their learning. However, I need to be careful to not allow myself to fall into the temptation of believing that they don't need instruction, correction, or guidance. A student that teaches herself should be pushed further, not just allowed to teach herself. Similarly, what does this mean for my other students? I also can't allow myself to think of them as unable to take responsibility for their learning.

We love to categorize people. Two categories are Honors classes and general classes, which is appropriate and helps us meet their needs, but the categories must always be balanced out by the individuals.

Follow the Leader

Megan and I had some good debrief time for a few minutes at the end of the day today. We were commenting on the observation that each class seems to have a natural leader, regardless of whether or not that leader is a positive influence. Each class has one student that is willing to speak up and share his opinion (and it is a guy in every case). In the Honors class, the leader starts off discussions, asks questions no one else is willing to ask, or helps to keep his group on task. In one of the general Chem classes, the leader cracks jokes, ridicules other peoples answers, or contributes to distractions. However, we started off by calling him out at the beginning of the year for not contributing to a positive environment. He's repeated the phrase now himself several times, calling other people out for negative comments. To him, it's a joke and a way to gain attention or respect in the classroom, but he is helping us keep that consistent theme going in the classroom, which will also serve a dual purpose of placing more weight on times when we remind him to be positive, since he's the one reminding everyone else.

Each class has its own dynamic - this is just one example. Megan and I talked briefly about how we can let these leaders lead the class, as long as we are leading them. We can use their leadership to our advantage. As long as I'm always handling the classroom with confidence, I can work to manage the classroom culture through identifying and guiding the natural leader among the students. Each class will have its own culture. I've seen that already. Third and 4th periods are calm and subdued in comparison to 5th and 7th, which are far more eager to talk and joke with me and each other. I have to find the balance of letting the kids form their natural culture and me creating a culture that is positive and conducive to learning. 

Watch and Learn

Today I taught an entire class period...well, almost. Megan started the period off with some announcements and other items, but then I took over for the rest of the period, which was fun, because we plated a penny in zinc and then heated it to turn it into brass, making it look like gold. We used this demo to work on formulating and testing a hypothesis. Some students had a hard time explaining how the copper penny all of a sudden looked gold.

 I strategically opted to teach our last section. I think it went pretty well, but only because I watched Megan teach the same class three times earlier in the day. Watching her makes a huge difference in giving me an idea of how much time to give to each aspect. Megan and I talked about how I could work on my flow throughout the class period - flowing from one topic or task to the next - which will naturally get better with time. I have noticed myself getting more comfortable being in front of the class and I think that helps with having smooth transitions. When I'm nervous, I find myself always rushing to the next thing I want to cover, rather than taking a breath and letting the students have a second to soak up the information.