With the global pandemic, many schools were forced into a 1:1 environment where every student has a laptop and teachers have to navigate new technology. I have been a teacher in a 1:1 classroom for six years because our small public high school was one of the first in the county to pilot 1:1 and key tech tools like Schoology. As an Instructional Coach, I realized in the fall as principals were getting ready to do their first round of observations that they would need to look at things a little differently in a 1:1 world. The typical hallmarks they looked for may not be there in the same way, but that doesn’t mean those elements are lacking.
Teaching in a one-to-one environment looks a lot differently than traditional classrooms. Here are some of the differences you may want to be aware of during classroom observations and teacher evaluations.
In light of these differences, administrators may want to sit where they can see the teacher’s screen and access the teacher’s online course during the observation so that they can see what the students see and access materials.
For teachers transitioning to this environment, you need to highlight the things you are doing in the pre- or post-conference with your principal. Make sure the person observing knows how you used groups or gave feedback during the lesson.
Good instruction is still good instruction. Find ways to incorporate all the good instructional practices into a digital space. You can download this document for free if you would like to use it to support your conversations at your school.
Last year, when I initiated a conversation with my students about cheating, an interesting idea emerged from the discussion: Students believed that cheating yielded them more useful life skills than much of the stuff they were being taught in the classes. After all, isn’t cheating just a different form of collaboration?
As adults, we know that cheating and collaboration are very different. In this age of online and remote learning, I wonder if it’s as obvious to our students. They are Facetiming and texting with each other almost all day long. In remote learning, it’s common for friends to Facetime while they are “in class.” And even when in person in class, there is still a lot of texting going on.
As teachers, we are also giving students more opportunities to collaborate through Zoom breakout rooms and small group work in class. But I wonder if the difference between collaborating and cheating is as clear to our students.
Personally, I like to address cheating directly with students in two ways: 1) eliminating the need to cheat and 2) teaching them explicitly about cheating.
We need to have conversations about ethical behavior in our classrooms, and it’s important to have open conversations about cheating and your expectations for students. Sometimes students resort to cheating because they feel it is their only option because they have run out of time or don’t understand the material. But as teachers, we can help them think through other options. We can make ourselves available for support and work on building relationships so that they can ask us for help. We can have late policies that allow them to submit late work with consequences that don’t destroy their grade. We also need to have conversations to help them understand the consequences of cheating in the long run when this becomes a habit and a way of life. Challenge them to actually do the work and call them to a higher standard.
As collaboration becomes a more central part of education at all levels, it’s important to teach students the differences between cheating and collaboration. Below is a chart and excerpt we incorporated into our Student Handbook this year.
CHEATING
COLLABORATION
Copying someone’s answers from their work
Showing someone the steps you went through to solve the problem
Letting one person’s work stand for the whole group
Working together to create a work product that represents the thinking of everyone in the group
Getting answers from someone else on Mastery Checks or a summative assessment
Working with someone on a homework or Engagement assignment that is a formative assessment
Giving someone else access to your work so they can make changes or copy/paste (making them an editor)
Sharing your work with them (view only or suggestion only)
Telling someone exactly what to write word for word
Discussing your answers before you each write down your own answers
One person is doing all the work
Both people are contributing to the work
Created by Joy Patton
“Academic integrity is more important now than ever. If you want to get the most out of your education, it is important that you commit to doing your own work and not taking shortcuts, even if you won’t get caught. Integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is watching. We expect you to have academic integrity. Please notify a teacher or administrator if you are aware of situations where students are cheating. We all work together to make sure that our education at this school means something.”
What have you done in your classroom or school to help students understand the difference between cheating and collaboration?
Cheating may not look this way anymore, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
We all know that it happens. No matter what measures we have in place, not matter how hard we look – every teacher knows that at some point some student has cheated in their class and gotten away with it.
Cheating has become quite prevalent and normalized in many of our academic cultures. At the beginning of the 2019-2020 school year, I curated several articles about cheating to prompt some discussion during the first week of school. Two interesting ideas emerged from my discussion with students: 1) Students felt justified in cheating in classes where they did not feel the content would be relevant to their lives after high school. 2) Students felt that learning the skills needed to cheat were more valuable than much of what they were being taught in school.
And now with the advent of more online teaching in the fall of 2020, this conversation has emerged among teachers as well. We know that students are constantly Face timing and texting with friends during online school. We know the temptation to cheat is present for the modern student, and, based on the feedback from my students last year, one many students don’t deem worth overcoming.
As a classroom teacher, my question was “How hard am I willing to work to make sure that kids don’t cheat?” I could make different tests and distribute different copies to students. I could be constantly circulating and watching every move. I could confiscate every phone at the beginning of class. But I knew that no matter how much work I did, if a student wanted/ needed to cheat, then they would find a way to do it, in spite of all my effort.
There are reasonable and relatively easy things we as teachers can do in an electronic age to discourage cheating, especially when using electronic tools: shuffle the order of the questions or answers, monitor screens with online software like DyKnow, use applications that allow locking down browsers, use platforms like TurnItIn.com to detect plagiarism. But we all know that none of those prevents it completely.
Personally, I like to address cheating in two ways: 1) eliminating the need to cheat and 2) teaching them explicitly about cheating. In this blog, I want to talk about the first one by asking the question what can educators do to reduce the need to cheat?
Address the culture of the school. I’ve found that cheating typically correlates with the overall culture of the school. In a school with a “win at all costs” mentality, where the A or the high GPA is the only goal, even highly capable students will cheat in order to ensure success. However, in a school culture that focuses on growth, not perfection, and students are allowed to re-do work in order to demonstrate mastery, the need to cheat diminishes. If you reduce the pressure to succeed at all costs, you can reduce the need to cheat. One of the benefits of mastery-based grading or standards-based grading is that students can make another attempt if they don’t mast it the first time.
Slow down the pace or allow students to self-pace. Students cheat when they don’t understand the material. They haven’t learned it at the same pace as everyone else in the class, and the class is moving on. Sometimes rather than face severe late penalties, they take a faster route like purchasing an essay off the internet or getting the answers from a friend. As teachers, we often assume that students simply lack the motivation to do the work. This can keep us from adding support to those who truly need it. We combat this through smaller mastery checks and formative assessments to identify who doesn’t know the material, and then we need to provide the support they need. Sometimes that’s small group work in class, sometimes it’s a one-on-one conversation, sometimes it’s additional tutoring outside of school. The Modern classrooms Project is one of the best structures I’ve seen for allowing students to self-pace.
Make the material worth learning. Sometimes student cheat because they don’t think the material is worth learning. They fail to see the connection between the classwork and the real world. In many course curricula, this connection can be hard to find – even for the teachers. When I design my units, I want to make sure that my final assessment creates a “need to know” for students by solving a real-world problem or creating a real-world project. Are the students in your class simply mastering information to take a test or is the information something they need to use to solve a real-world problem? The more connections I can make for them, the more the will see the value of the work.
Do more project-based assessments. When students have to do something with the information they have been learning, it will become clear who does and who doesn’t know the material. A colleague who taught online college classes for years echoed this sentiment, and many colleges are moving to this kind of assessment for this reason. Make sure your assessments ask students to use the information to solve a problem. If you want to know more about PBL or find high quality projects, check out PBLWorks.org.
Be approachable. Just because you offer additional support, it doesn’t mean that the students who need it will take advantage of it. We also have to be approachable and inviting so that students feel like they can ask for what they need. If a student legitimately needs an extension on a deadline, they should be able to ask for it. No matter what your overall school culture is, you can create a culture of safety within your classroom. Create a culture where students ask questions when they don’t understand, where students can ask for help, where students can ask for what they need without being ashamed or embarrassed.
These are some of the things I have done to eliminate the need for students to cheat in my classroom…although I”m pretty sure you could find some who have. Again, completely eliminating cheating doesn’t seem like a reasonable goal for me. But I can do things to eliminate the need to cheat.
What are some things you have done to eliminate the need to cheat in your classroom?
Standards-based grading is becoming more and more popular and gaining a lot of merit in the educational community. When I posted in a teacher Facebook community that I had some experience with this in ELA, I had several people reach out to me and ask questions. Mastery/standards-based grading makes a lot of sense and fits very logically in courses like math and science when standards instruction is more linear. First you learn this skill and master it, and then you learn this skill and master it.
However, in ELA and other humanities courses, the standards instruction is more like a spiral. When I woke up in a Common Core classroom after being out of teaching for 13 years, I remember my principal asked me what standard I was trying to teach with this text. I looked at him blankly and said, “All of them..I touch on all of them.” From main idea to inference to author’s background and historical background, I generally taught all of them all at the same time. This was one of the biggest shifts I saw in education when I returned. No longer were English curricula built around time periods and specific texts, they were built around standards, and I had to make the shift in order to survive in this brave new world.
But there was also another disconnect between mastery-based learning and ELA. Just because students could find the main idea in a sixth grade level text, it didn’t mean they could find the main idea in a 12th grade level text. The level of mastery had to be viewed alongside the level of the text. You also couldn’t master this skill with one text and be expected to move on to inference with another another text. Additionally how could a student be expected to master one of the standards that required analyzing the text if they didn’t comprehend the text on a basic level? You can see the spiral nature of the instruction and the reason ELA teachers get all turned upside down in mastery-based learning and standards-based grading conversations.
One of the biggest “aha moments” for me in my Masters education course came when I realized that the Common Core standards were written with the understanding that the lower standards were embedded within the higher standards. This meant that I was very justified in checking for basic comprehension before moving on to analysis. It did NOT mean that if I was teaching a standard that required analysis, I had to jump over the comprehension skills and only focus on the analysis. Rather I went THROUGH the comprehension skills to get to the analysis skills, so that students could demonstrate mastery. This may seem obvious to some, but for me it was revolutionary and gave me more freedom in teaching and assessing the standards. It meant I could start with comprehension, I just couldn’t end there; we had to keep pushing for higher skills.
When it comes to grading for mastery, our school was in a county that as a whole followed more traditional grading methods. So we had to figure out a system that worked within that system that still gave out overall grades based on percentage unlike some schools that can shift to a 1-4 grading scale to show mastery, which doesn’t present the same mathematical challenges as a 100-point system.
To that end, we devised a school-wide grading system and language that we used to reflect a student’s mastery level that was also tied to a percentage grade. 100%-Advanced 87%-Proficient 73%-Emerging Proficient 50%-Insufficient Evidence
This developed a common language for Mastery. Sometimes we also used those categories to assign overall quiz grades. For example, I decided that on my Vocabulary Quizzes, 90-100% would fall in the range of Advanced. Instead of giving the exact grade, students would get a 100% if they fell within this range. Plus when they and their parents saw that grade, it said, “I was Advanced on this vocabulary,” not “I got all of the answers right.” I found this naturally provided a curve for student’s grades and padding for when they pushed a wrong button or thought a question was unfair. It also kept students from retaking the quiz multiple times to get a 100%, something that was more time consuming for me as a teacher and didn’t really provide deeper learning for them.
Then in English, we had five grading categories that reflected the major sections of standards and were weighted as follows: Reading Literature – 20% Reading Info Texts – 20% Writing – 30% Speaking & Listening – 10% Language – 20%
Then assignments were graded with rubrics that had those percentages attached to them and put into larger grading categories. This forced me to focus on the standards when grading and not on “everything.” For example, when graded a student’s written response to a piece of literature, I didn’t take off for grammatical errors because it was not a “Language” grade. It was a “Reading Literature” grade, so I focused only on how their answers reflected their knowledge and analysis of the text.
On larger essays and projects, I would assign multiple grades for a single assignment. For example, when grading a literature analysis essay, students would get a Reading Literature grade that reflected their ability to understand and analyze the text and a Language grade that reflected their use of grammar conventions. While entering more than one grade may seem like more work, it ultimately meant I could meet my district’s requirement for nine grades each quarter with fewer assignments.
What I liked about this form of grading in the ELA classroom was that their end total grade was often an accurate reflection of their ability. In order to check the fidelity of my grades, I would use Benchmarks and end of course tests to see if they scored similarly, and this was often the case. This told me that my grading was a fairly accurate representation of their ability, which is often NOT the case in more traditional settings.
It also meant that when a student came to me wanting to improve their grade, we would look at which category had the lowest overall percentage. For example, if they had a 50% in Language and an 87% average in Reading Literature, I would suggest that they go back and edit their essay more carefully by addressing my feedback. Then they would resubmit the essay, and I would look just at the grammar to see if they demonstrated more mastery of the conventions. If so, I would adjust the Language grade, but leave the Reading Literature grade the same. This encouraged students to focus on the skills they needed more work in, which is ultimately what was best for them as students.
This is the basic outline of how I wrapped my head around standards-based grading in my classroom. Please post any other questions you have about how to make this philosophy practical for your classroom in the comments below.
It’s two days before school starts, and it’s 4 AM. I’m awake…This is the week that teachers go back before the students go back. I typically have at least one night where I wake up just enough that my brain turns on and can’t go back to sleep. I will also have at least one back to school nightmare that includes going to the wrong classroom, not having a lesson plan, not being prepared – or this year’s – not knowing how to work the coffee machine at a school I’m visiting.
This year I’m switching sides of the desk. Instead of teaching quirky, weird high school students, I’m teaching the teachers of these amazing high school students. I say teaching, but I’m not teaching them anything they don’t know – unless it’s related to our new learning management system. This year I’m an Instructional Coach, which means I get to come alongside them and support them in whatever they need. It’s a new challenge – exactly what I wanted this year.
But here’s what I want you to know: be kind to teachers because they are working really hard. As Brene Brown said in her first podcast, it is everyone’s “freaking first time” through a global pandemic. And the first time you do anything, it’s really scary and you often don’t do it perfectly. No one can lead with experience, but everyone has an opinion – often a strong one.
As kids go back to school this week, be patient. We are all still learning how to parent in a global pandemic, how to work in a global pandemic, how to do school in a global pandemic – especially how to do all three at the same time. Be patient with yourselves, your kids and their teachers.
If you have a minute, send some love to a teacher. Normally I would say hug a teacher, but – you know – global pandemic. So send some love to a teacher in your life. Let them know they are appreciated and that everything will be okay, even if the first day is a little crazy. Let them know you appreciate all the unpaid hours they have put in over the summer trying to get ready.
Here’s some of my ideas to send love:
Email message or written note to say thank you
Ask them what books or supplies they need for their classroom
Starbucks gift card (or other restaurants) because we don’t get to eat lunch out once the kids come
Chocolate and Office supplies
Vote for tax increases and measures that would improve their salaries
Send a happy, safe, secure kid to to school by loving them well at home
I have a seat next to my desk, and when students want to talk to me, I invite them into “my office.” This time the student sitting in the chair was feverishly working to get his grade up. He had re-done some of his work, hoping to get a better grade. (This is part of the standards-based practice at our school.) He was trying every possible avenue, including arguing with me about a discussion grade I had just given. He was trying to convince me of what he said in the discussion that deserved more points. We were both getting frustrated because we were having trouble finding a compromise that would satisfy both of us. I could see the tears falling down his cheeks. I waited a few minutes and did some other work, mostly to calm myself down and assess the real the issue.
With an 89%, he was so close to an A, but not quite there. I knew that in a couple weeks when other grades were added that he would have no problem being at 91%. He had also made it clear that he was not willing to do any of the Enrichment Activities I had recommended that could help improve his grade and help give him extra practice in standards that he was weak in. After a few minutes, I tried a different approach.
“Your grade seems really important to you right now. Can you tell me what’s driving that?”
“It’s my parents,” he said.
“Would you like me to email them or call them and tell me what you have worked on today?”
“It won’t help,” he said. “They don’t care about effort. They only care about results.”
I was stunned and sad. I didn’t know what else I could say. I knew the student had been recently hospitalized for anxiety and depression and suicide attempts. Of all the pressures he already faced, this grade expectation of the parents just added even more. I also knew that he could be adding his own interpretation to that expectation as well.
Parents definitely play a role in supporting their kids at school. The tricky part of parenting is to make sure that the expectations are in line with the student’s abilities. Parents can also add other motivating factors to keep the student moving forward. But when the student becomes overwhelmed and awash in anxiety, he is no longer moving forward. Most likely he starts to shut down.
The conversation with my student was followed by a conversation I had with my nine-year-old daughter over dinner when I asked her how school was going.
“Good,” she said. “I just wish I could do better on my grammar tests.”
“What grades have you been getting?” I honestly didn’t know because I only look at their overall grades once a week, and I only look at specific grades if the overall grade is low. Mostly I want my kids to manage their school work on their own, even in fourth grade. This is an appropriate expectation for my kids’ abilities.
“I always miss one or two, so I get a 96 or an 88. But I want to get a 100.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because then I will have good grades.”
“You realize that a 96 is also an A.”
“Yes, but I want a 100.”
“Why? What would it mean if you got a 100?” I was curious because fourth grade is really too early to start thinking about GPA, and she certainly never heard me lay down that expectation.
“It would mean that I was smart.”
“Grades don’t necessarily mean that. Are you doing your best? Are you reviewing the answers you got wrong? Are you asking questions when you don’t understand?”
“Yes,” she said. “I am.”
“Then you should be happy with your grade as long as you tried your best. I’m proud of you for trying. The goal is to get better and do your best. That’s what I want from you.”
My daughter had a really high expectation for herself, and that’s okay. But it’s definitely not worth adding anxiety and negative self talk over four percentage points.
And that’s what the student in my office and my daughter were both doing: their best and trying to get better. This is the growth mindset that gets thrown out the window when our expectations for our students get boiled down to a letter grade. Both of these students were already smart, and I wanted them to know that, no matter what the final percentage grade. I expect both of them to do their best and ask questions when they don’t understand.
Recently I sat with a student who wrote me a very nice note thanking me for letting him ask questions. Imagine that! A teacher who lets a student ask questions.
I thanked him for his note and said, “I think curiosity is a very important thing. I think you should have a child like wonder and curiosity about the world no matter how old you get. Sometimes in education we are very good at training the curiosity right out of children. I don’t want to do that as a teacher.”
“You know,” he said, “ not everyone is like you. Not all teachers think that way.”
This set me back. I generally assume that this is something all teachers would want in their kids. However, I know from my own parenting experience that is not always true. I remember when my oldest son came home from elementary school and told me that his teacher limited him to asking three questions each day. From the teacher’s point of view, I could understand this because I know that my son was probably asking questions that were off topic and hoped the teacher would take the bait and go down a bunny trail. Or perhaps he was asking silly questions to get a reaction out of the class. Or perhaps the questions took longer to answer and messed up the timing of her lessons. I can understand that this was part of her classroom management strategy.
However, consider the message this sent, not only to my son, but to all the students in the class. “If you ask too many questions, you are annoying. The teacher is the only one who can ask the questions, so you can sit back and not really engage your brain. You don’t need to think about this topic; you just need to spit out the right answer. Stop being so curious; just stick to the plan.” And that’s exactly what our students do: they stop being curious.
What if we approach students who ask questions a different way? I know that my own curious student would often ask questions that could also derail the class or get us off topic. But instead of limiting the questions, try another response that maintains curiosity:
Hmmm…You have me stumped. I’ll go look that up while you are working.
Does anyone know the answer to that question? Or ask another student the same question. (This is great for procedural questions. The trick with this one is to avoid adding a dose of condescension or shame to the turned question.)
But have you considered….? Answering a question with a question is one of my favorites.
I don’t know the answer to that one. Go look it up and bring the answer back tomorrow.
I’m not sure that’s the right question to ask. What’s the question behind the question? (Sometimes being enigmatic in your answer goes a long way.)
I like the way you are thinking, but we aren’t going to get that far today. Please ask me that question tomorrow.
I’m so glad you asked, and I’m about to explain that more. When I’m finished if you still have the question, ask it again.
I have a great story to tell to answer that question. Remind me in the last five minutes of class, and if we have time, I’ll tell you.
I think that’s a fascinating question, but it’s not in line with what we are doing right now. Maybe we can discuss it in the last five minutes of class if everyone gets their work done.
All of these maintain curiosity and keep the door open for students to engage in the learning and keep thinking. Having all the answers to all the questions is NEVER the point. When I set myself up to be the only one who knows the answers, I have failed to make my students responsible for their own education.
Here are some other ideas to encourage curiosity in your classroom:
Ask an exit question about the content for the day. But if they don’t know the answer, they can also ask you a question about what was covered.
Give more points in discussions when students ask questions that propel the discussion forward.
Teach students how to write quality discussion questions, and then have them write the questions.
Make your research projects more open-ended.
Leave some problems unsolved or don’t tell them the end of the story before they read it.
Model asking questions and thinking out loud about the topic.
Have an opportunity in the class when students can ask you questions privately. I tell them “my office is open” and that allows them to come ask questions.
What are some other strategies you have used to maintain curiosity in your classroom? What would you add to this list for your level and content area?
It was toward the end of the year, and I was soliciting feedback from students about the year and the curriculum that was covered. This is invaluable information. If you are a teacher who wants to keep growing and keep innovating in the classroom, you can’t skip over this step.
In a group of juniors, the preparation for the ACT inevitably comes up. One student said that since the ACT was such an important test and such a big factor in determining their futures that we should spend even more time getting students ready for it. In fact, she was proposing that we only teach ACT style texts and give tests only in an ACT-type of format.
“Is that what WE feel is the most important thing about education?” I asked the group as a whole. Blank faces stared back at me.
“Well, everyone tells us that it is. Everyone else says that it’s basically what decides our future.”
“Yes, but is that what WE have decided? Have WE decided that your future can be determined by one test? Is that what WE believe?”
At this point, the group was getting confused about why I was emphasizing “we” so much.
“But WE aren’t the ones who make the decisions,” they retorted defensively.
“I know that’s true today, but some day you will be the ones making the decisions. And I wonder if that’s what WE will decide that education is all about. I wonder if WE will reduce all of education to a single test. It is, after all, easier that way. So if that’s what WE decide, then I guess that’s how it will go.”
In the back of my mind during this discussion were the things I had been learning in my masters degree program about the purpose of curriculum. More than anything, the point of the curriculum, the designed course of study, is to produce people who will become qualified workers in their communities. The connection between the community and curriculum is very strong and has been since ancient Greece. This is ultimately the point of education; therefore, the community has a big say in the curriculum of school.
So often our students put themselves in the position of the victim. “We have to do this because this is what someone else decided that we should do.” But in the United States where we are tasked with producing citizens for a democratic society, no one is the victim. We value each voice and each vote. We use our voices to protest and to create change. We volunteer and fill in the gaps when the state falls short. This is what WE have decided that WE will do.
But more and more I worry that WE as parents have not decided what WE want for our children. I have yet to have a parent thank me for all the information the state test has given them about their child. But I have heard many parents complain about how much testing their children must endure each year. When will WE decide to change it? What do WE really value in an education for our children?
I hope that WE will decide that each student is unique and has unique skills to offer in the workplace. I hope WE will decide that it’s worth helping kids identify and develop those special skills. I hope that WE will not reduce the worth of our students to a single test score. I hope that WE will not make their entire future hinge on one test. I hope that WE will decide that growing thinking, empathetic people is more important than growing our average ACT score.
It happens every year. Almost every week and sometimes every day. Students walk into my room and ask if they can just “do nothing” for the day. Can’t we have a break? Do we HAVE to do stuff today? Can’t we just play on our phones for the whole period? They beg for a period of time to just sit there and do nothing.
What I have politely explained to them is that I simply can’t do that. Not because we have a big test coming up, not because my boss would be mad at me, not because I’m so full of endless energy that I just can’t stop. But the reason is very simple.
When you ask me not to teach, you are asking me to deny who I am, to not do the thing that I love to do. “I’m a teacher!” I said to them one day. “I teach stuff!” I’m not going to ask you not to be who you are, so please don’t ask me to stop being who I am. Teaching is what I do; it’s what I was made to do. When you ask me not to teach, even for a day, you ask me to be less of who I am. The kids were amused and put it our our class quote board.
In our culture, and especially at our school where each unique individual is celebrated, keeping someone from being who they are is the cardinal sin. Not allowing someone to freely express themselves is practically the worst thing you could do.
So if you come into my room and ask me not to teach.
It happens every year. Almost every week and sometimes every day. Students walk into my room and ask if they can just “do nothing” for the day. Can’t we have a break? Do we HAVE to do stuff today? Can’t we just play on our phones for the whole period? They beg for a period of time to just sit there and do nothing.
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