Good Morning Blog

So much talk about how relationships matter. So. Much. Talk. If you're an educator and you've been paying attention lately, you are no doubt familiar with the push to improve relationships between teachers and students. Relationships will get students to behave better, be more engaged, learn more, be more emotionally intelligent, and so much more. I recall a training I was at about a year ago. The training was supposed to be about teaching students who come from poverty. But for a training that was a couple of hours long, the overwhelming majority of the training was about defining poverty, characteristics of students living in poverty, and other things of that nature. At the very end, literally only the last few minutes, it was suggested that the way to reach students from poverty was to build, you guessed it, relationships. The Twitterverse and Blogosphere are much the same. Relationships are everything. They're the future. They'll fix all of your classroo...

[This past summer (2018) I had the opportunity to present at two different  Indiana Department of Education Summer of eLearning  conferences; the  South Shore eLearning Conference  hosted by  School City of Hammond  and the  eVillage  Conference hosted by  East Porter County Schools  in conjunction with eLeadNWI. The presentation that easily received the most buzz was my " How I Flipped My Classroom In All the Ways That Matter ." This blog entry is the fourth in a four part series outlining the contents of that presentation.] Part 1 Recap : Teaching the way I was taught wasn't working. I started using Khan Academy in class. That helped. But I wanted more. Part 2 Recap : I flipped my classroom for 2 years. That seemed to work better, but it wasn't great. I wanted more. Part 3 Recap : Being on Twitter introduced me to ideas in education I would not have heard otherwise. My past experience with coding gave me some perspective on the l...

[This past summer (2018) I had the opportunity to present at two different  Indiana Department of Education Summer of eLearning  conferences; the  South Shore eLearning Conference  hosted by  School City of Hammond  and the  eVillage  Conference hosted by  East Porter County Schools  in conjunction with eLeadNWI. The presentation that easily received the most buzz was my " How I Flipped My Classroom In All the Ways That Matter ." This blog entry is the third in a four part series outlining the contents of that presentation.] Part 1 Recap : Teaching the way I was taught wasn't working. I started using Khan Academy in class. That helped. But I wanted more. Part 2 Recap : I flipped my classroom for 2 years. That seemed to work better, but it wasn't great. I wanted more. Great. Now you're up to speed. I thought I had changed some big things about how my classes operated and was only seeing small changes in the outcomes. But the truth i...

[This past summer (2018) I had the opportunity to present at two different  Indiana Department of Education Summer of eLearning  conferences; the  South Shore eLearning Conference  hosted by  School City of Hammond  and the  eVillage  Conference hosted by  East Porter County Schools  in conjunction with eLeadNWI. The presentation that easily received the most buzz was my " How I Flipped My Classroom In All the Ways That Matter ." This blog entry is the second in a four part series outlining the contents of that presentation.] Part 1 Recap : Teaching the way I was taught wasn't working. I started using Khan Academy in class. That helped. But I wanted more. Great. Now you're up to speed. The following August I began the school year using Khan Academy in my Algebra 1 classes. It wasn't the only thing we used, but we used it plenty. While Khan Academy did offer students the opportunity to practice specific skills with instant feedback , ...

[This past summer (2018) I had the opportunity to present at two different Indiana Department of Education Summer of eLearning conferences; the South Shore eLearning Conference hosted by School City of Hammond and the eVillage Conference hosted by East Porter County Schools in conjunction with eLeadNWI. The presentation that easily received the most buzz was my " How I Flipped My Classroom In All the Ways That Matter ." This blog entry is the first in a four part series outlining the contents of that presentation.] For years, the underlying structure of each day in my classes was essentially the same; go over questions from the previous assignment, lecture over the new lesson, and give students the next assignment. Lather, rinse, repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat... And I kept doing it this way for far too long because that was how all of my math classes were when I was in school. That was basically how all of the math teachers I knew taught their classes. Tha...

Myself and a few other teachers were in a parent meeting the other day. During the meeting the parent asked us which, if any assignments their child could still make up. I won't divulge what was said in the meeting. But after the meeting we were standing around talking about the issues of accepting late work and which grade book style we use; marking periods or running total. The decisions about whether, when, and why to accept late work, what type of grade book to use, why, and so many others are all decisions that teachers make or think about every year. They make those decisions based on beliefs that they hold more dearly than they do other beliefs. In education it is supposed to be about the students and their learning. A noble, altruistic goal, to say the least.  Is it about students and their learning? Or is that just something we say? Other factors often creep into the decision making process; funding, job security, politics, etc. At some point, what we...

In my last post, Better Late Than Never , I described why I allow students to complete assignments after the due date. In short, I believe there is instructional value in completing the work even though the due date has passed. But students will get the most instructional value from the assignment when the assignment is completed correctly. And that's what this post is about; why I let students redo assignments. I have seen students receive graded work back and immediately toss it in the recycling bin without so much as glancing past the score they received more times than I can count. If the student was making a mistake that I commented on, they never saw it. If they were doing something especially well that I commented on, they never saw it. I could have drawn funny pictures of cats for all they knew. They never would have seen them. Once the assignment was graded it was over. The students felt there was no more learning to be done. But there was. I made comments about wha...