What You Think Your Students Are Learning But Aren’t: Collaboration as Eye-Opener

1. NAfME National In-Service Conference 2014 What You Think Your Students Are Learning But Aren’t: Collaboration as Eye-Opener Camille Kingman Orem Junior High School (UT) ckingman@alpinedistrict.org

3. What You Think You Are Teaching But Aren’t: Delusions Revealed

4. Confessions of a Collaboration Hater: Learning to Love Group Work

5. What You Can Learn from What Your Students Aren’t Learning

6. Goals • Tools and resources • What collaboration looks like: a professional learning community of music educators in action • How to collaborate • How to use data • How collaborative work ties into new National Core Music Standards

7. Tools choirplc.com choirhelp.weebly.com

8. Tools

9. choirplc.com: Scope Page

10. choirplc.com: Assessments Page Password: choirplc

11. choirplc.com: Data Page

12. choirplc.com: Formative Assessments Pages

13. Tools

15. PLC by the Numbers4 years of high-functioning collaboration11 junior high schools 17 choral educators0 district administrators3500+ students each fall3 levels of curriculum46 common assessments created to date

16. How We Got Started • Monthly meetings • Summer grant in 2011 • Unpacked our state core curriculum • Created specific benchmarks for 7th Grade Choir, focusing on music notation skills • Divided into sub-groups to complete work • Wrote a comprehensive pre-test and post-test • Made a SMART goal • Gave the assessment and collected student data

17. Unpacking “Identify and define standard notation terms and symbols for pitch, rhythm, dynamics, tempo, articulation, and expression.”

18. Beginning Pre-Test, 2011-2012

19. Beginning Post-Test, 2011-2012

20. How Did We Do? • We finally knew where we stood. • We made some progress, 347 more students showed proficiency. • We did NOT meet our SMART goal and we were SHOCKED. • We had taught the basics. • We had been more meticulous about our teaching than ever. • We had talked about teaching more than ever. • How many years had we been in denial about what our students were learning?

21. Why Didn’t We Give Up? • Inexperienced • Mistakes • Unrealistic goals • Didn’t know how to write quality assessments • Difficult to collect data • Didn’t know how to use data • Worked so hard and still had many failing students • We didn’t receive a collaboration grant for 2012

22. Why Didn’t We Give Up? • Greater organization • Heightened team collegiality • Accountability to members of the team • Improved teacher instruction • Increased student learning • Access to resources • Getting over the delusion “I taught it, they got it.”

23. Beginning Pre-Test, 2012-2013

24. Beginning Post-Test, 2012-2013

25. Beginning Assessments, 3-Year Comparison

26. This Year’s Baseline Proficiency Data

27. Where We Are Now • Meet 2-3 times a month • Beginning, Intermediate, Advanced Curricula • Collect common data on formative assessments, not only summative post-tests • Unified use of Mastery Connect software for data collection • Teacher website • Student website

28. How do we collaborate?

29. Collaborate with those who share your same discipline. • Specialize within music disciplines (band, choir, orchestra) if you can • You will need to have the support of your administrators • Reach out beyond your physical school site • Use technology to collaborate • Increase your collaboration proficiency, then collaborate with other educators who might not teach what you do • New national standards will help in collaboration amongst diverse arts educators

30. Collaboration is NOT • Cooperation • Event Planning • Collegiality

31. Collaboration IS • Shared values and vision centering on students’ learning • Collective teacher learning and application of learning • Shared personal practice • Action and experimentation orientation • Shared leadership

32. What do we want our students to know? • What do we want a 7th grade student leaving my choir class to be able to know and do? • Intended, enacted, assessed, and learned curricula • Do we want our students to learn how to sing and interpret a piece of music they just picked up? • Do we want our students to memorize symbols and definitions? • Do we want our students to learn how to take multiple choice tests? • Do we want our students to learn that music reading skills are separate from the “fun” music-making they enjoy outside of the classroom?

33. What is essential? • Must know • Good to know • Nice to know • Ultimately, only you know what is essential for your students in your situation. • Your list of essentials will evolve, and probably shrink, as time passes.

34. What is essential? Facility in solfege Letter names on the staff

35. What is essential? Aural skills Terminology

36. Start small. • The “easy” project will be far more difficult than you realize. • Choose one unit in one level of curriculum. • Choose concepts/objectives that are easily assessed. • In large PLCs (5+ teachers) divide work amongst subgroups. • Be patient with yourself and others.

37. How will we know if they learned it? • Answers are more elusive than you think • This is the course in assessment writing that you never had. • You have to write an assessment. • It will take longer to create than you predict. • You’ll finally finish, and you’ll be proud. • You have to actually give the assessment. • Once you have used the assessment, you’ll hate it. • Repeat.

38. How will we know if they learned it? • Moment of truth • Nothing will be scarier than the first batch of data • Checkups versus autopsies • Assessments are just as much for the teacher as for the student • Allow a minute for you and your students to adjust, logistically and psychologically

39. Common Assessment • Assessment is not common until data is collected and shared. • Be very specific about data collection. • When • Where • What • How • Use technology: the computer is better at grading than you anyway.

40. Avoid the DRIP syndrome. • Data • Rich • Information • Poor • What do we do with data once we have it?

41. Pre-Test Data • Establish a baseline • Adjust curriculum for the classroom • Adjust curriculum for individual students • Inform assignment of students to teams for group work • Fix mistakes in assessment

42. Formative Data • Assessment FOR learning • Not for the purpose of putting assignments in the grade book • Provide immediate feedback to students • You will need help • Extra time in the day • Student teachers and college students • Students who are already proficient • Technology

43. Formative Data • Dialogue with students • “How did you get this answer?” • Validate students’ problem-solving skills • Learn how to think as your students think • Adjust future teaching to align with the styles of your students

44. Item Analysis

45. Item Analysis Beginning 7th Boys Beginning 7th Girls

46. Item Analysis Entire District Questions I Should Ask • What is the content of Questions 20 & 21? • Is there a better way to assess the content of Questions 20 & 21? • What is Question 24 asking? • How did my colleagues teach that content? • Is Question 23 too easy?

47. Item Analysis

48. Formative Data • Reflect: What did I do to teach this the first time? • Re-teaching does not mean to repeat the teaching you did the first time. • Provide experiential learning before assigning verbal terms. • Take another look at the question. • Is it assessing what you think it is? • Is it unnecessarily tricky? • Is it worded in student-friendly language? • Is the graphic clear? • Are the answer choices too similar to one another? • Is it simply a bad question?

49. Item Analysis Advanced Formative #1 For Your Consideration • Questions 1-5 are terms matching. • Question 6: Give the note names for mi, sol, ti, do’ in G Major. • Critical thinking • Abstract • Many skills needed to answer this one question

50. Formative Data • Which measure is louder, m. 39 or m. 41? • True or False: The steady beat is faster in m. 39 than in m. 46.