Measures for holistic learning?

Years ago at a conference at Google in Palo Alto, California, I found a man at my side during several episodes of the conference. Eventually, I had the the chance to talk to the man who said he was exploring holistic measures related to learning. That quest struck me as meaningful and intriguing.

As an educator, my aim is to teach the whole child, yet when it comes to assessing work related to that, like the man I met so many years ago, I am a bit challenged. How do we assess programs with a holistic lens--how do we know when a program serves a whole child well?

Tomorrow, I'll investigate this question with a greater lens as I meet with a diverse of Massachusetts educators who are looking to improve and develop their efforts related to assessing curriculum programs.  Our team will grapple with how to best assess students' learning and programming related to an interdisciplinary environmental science unit. What's working well and what can be better? How will we best assess that?

I'll certainly be a good listener with my dedicated team and the dedicated educators from throughout the state who are grappling with a similar question. This is a good start to growing our programs in meaningful and memorable ways.

When children lead their parent/family member-teacher conference

Fifth grade students are leading their parent/family member-teacher(s) conferences. At the table, the child is seated between their family members while the teacher(s) sits nearby. Using a showcase portfolio that includes signature examples of the child's study plus reflections about that study and related social-emotional learning, special events, learning preferences, and interests, the child leads the conversation which begins with the child introducing their family members to teachers with first and last names.

Essentially the result is a good conversation amongst all of the main members of a child's learning team about a child's strengths, challenges, interests, and goals. The teachers also share stat sheets which include assessments scores and comments from the child's main academic teachers. If needed, teachers and parents will speak alone for a few minutes during the conference too. The overall goal of these student-led discussions is to put the child in the driver's seat of their education.

Our collegial team has been developing this approach for a number of years now. At first, including the child was an option, and now we expect all children to lead their conferences. We've also developed the reflection pieces over time too to make those surveys more holistic and representative of the work we're doing and the ways children can use reflection to develop their effort, investment, self-advocacy, and success.

To further develop this approach, we can do the following:

• Bring most learning full circle including reflection and completion of projects, assessments, and other learning efforts.
• Include photos more often--pictures of students actively learning truly enrich the portfolio. When a child describes what's happening in a learning photo, they truly bring their learning alive during the conference.
• Update portfolios regularly--perhaps adding a reflection time each week where students look over and update their learning portfolio.

When students present, the developmental curve related to metacognition is evident. Some students easily lead the entire conference demonstrating keen awareness of their learning, and others are more reluctant and uncomfortable with this leadership. Also, students' reflections vary from sparse and elementary to deep and more sophisticated responses. This developmental curve makes me want to investigate these questions:

• How does nature/nurture affect metacognition? Are some students better at self-reflection because they have had more opportunity for this, or is this related more to the natural development of children?
• How can we help families to help children develop stronger metacognitive awareness? How can we grow this skill more at school?
• We notice some gender differences with regard to metacognition--is this a nature or nurture difference? I want to understand this more.

These child-led conferences help educators to really know their students better while also providing a good glimpse of the class as a whole. For example, there was a trend with this year's students with regard to active learning--they love moving which leads me to think about how I'll integrate more movement into the learning. 

Do you employ student-led conferences in your learning environment? If so, what are the highlights of this process? How do you develop and grow this work? I'll be thinking more about this in the days ahead. 

Science Teamwork

Today students created water filters as part of our STEAM Survival series. Most teams collaborated well and successfully created filters to clean water. A few teams and students struggled with teamwork.

An explicit discussion about teamwork and watching Ideo's classic shopping cart video set the stage for working together, failing often, and getting the project done. As far as teams and individuals that struggled with collaboration, we'll make some changes and add some coaching to help those teams and individuals. Some possible changes may include:

• changing team members around
• letting some work in a separate space with their teams
• providing a simpler project menu with more bonus to give students an easier way to be successful with the activity while still providing those who want more, enrichment. 

We've got a lot of science lessons to come and lots more collaboration throughout the curriculum, so this is an important focus.

Today's Science Adventure: Water Filters

Today, students will spend the morning learning science. While expected teaching schedules far outnumber the minutes in a day or energy in the room, we find we have to set aside big blocks of time now and then to teach science in a meaningful, productive, and positive way.

This morning students will learn science in the following way:

1. Before school, I'll complete the final prep steps of distributing sand, charcoal, filters, water testing charts, plastic containers, cloth, and dirty water from a local water area to students' investigation buckets.
2. When students arrive, they'll get their computers and headphones then go to the web page that includes videos and information related to today's water filter exploration. Students will have about 20 minutes to preview the videos and information.
3. I'll spend some time upfront reviewing the STEAM steps and the attributes of what makes an optimal STEAM team. Students will watch Ideo's shopping cart video to see an example of a strong STEAM team, and then we'll discuss what we saw and how we can replicate those positive attributes with today's investigation. 
4. They'll be a break to attend specialist subjects, a short recess, and then we'll start the specific exploration with a review of the investigation via words and videos.
5. After that students, using paper guide books and video guides on their computers, will begin the investigation. I'll help as needed as students choose team roles, test the dirty water, design their filters, record their results on paper, collect their supplies, create and test a first iteration of their water filters, then, if time allows, create and test a second iteration, answer the conclusion and reflection questions about their investigation in the student packets, and pass in their lab packets for teacher review. 

I'm glad we made good time for this investigation, and I'll be watching to see how students apply the learning that came before this, learning about optimal teamwork, step-by-step lab work, and thoughtful, detailed lab book responses and diagrams. 

While teaching like this requires extra time, when done well, there is a lot of satisfaction because children are generally happily engaged and they learn a lot! 

Science Teaching Prep and Planning

It takes a lot of time and space to set up a science lab for young children. Setting up the lab requires hours of gathering and organizing materials, hours in a day when most educators are lucky if they have a one-hour prep for all the work they have to do to plan and prepare each lesson, respond to emails, meet with family members and other educators, and keep up on the latest research. The space to store all the equipment is also rarely available in busy, small classrooms that house many children all day as well as supplies for all the other subjects. These are reasons why educators have shied away from lots of science teaching at the elementary level in the past.

That's also why educators' work day typically spills over to their personal lives with multiple hours in early in the morning, after school, and/or into the evening. Also, many educators are funding the supplies needed for science programs in school in order to make those programs more interesting, timely, and hands-on for students. Often, purchasing in school systems are somewhat punitive, inefficient, and unhelpful systems that make getting the materials you need in a timely manner an arduous, painstaking process so teachers, instead, simply use their own money to buy the materials on Amazon or at local shops--this can cost teachers up to $1,000 or more dollars a year. Teachers do this because it makes the lessons more successful, time-efficient, timely, and fun.

Massachusetts launched new science standards just a few years ago. The standards are good, and systems like the one I work in, have put together programs, supports, and materials to help teach these standards. This along with teachers' own purchases and significant time outside of the school day has put our science program on a good trajectory, but there's still more work to do.

As I learn to teach science more effectively, I'm coming up with processes that work well including the following:

• Tying the science teaching to timely events, good videos, and engaging hands-on activities. Some of the standards and lessons are rather dull on their own, but when you make the time to build those standards and lessons into more meaningful and memorable events, everyone learns more and enjoys the lessons too. Our team has worked at this which has resulted in good results with regard to engagement and learning. 
• Connecting science lessons under engaging themes helps to enliven the learning too. For example, we put many of the standards under the theme of survival which students are curious about. To make the theme more interdisciplinary we included a survival read aloud, Hatchet, and added a survival theme to students' narrative writing unit. At recent conferences, it was exciting to see students' enthusiasm, pride, and interest as they shared their thoughts about the read aloud, survival stories, and related science explorations. 
• Making the science come alive with expert visitors and field studies. Demonstrating that good learning happens with wonderful experts and in wonderful places outside of school brings life to a school program and makes the science teaching and learning more memorable and engaging too. 
• Making space for all those supplies and taking the time to order and take care of good quality supplies makes the planning and prep easier. For example, last year we spent a lot of time ordering and preparing supplies for our watershed model making activity, then this year the supplies were ready which made the prep easier. I am in the process of remaking my classroom yet again to make good space for all those supplies too.
• Creating lab books that go along with each investigation provides a good guide for students, colleagues, and family members. Guiding packets act as recipes to the science learning by including the materials, steps, and room for thoughtful answers, questions, and reflection. These little booklets are good go-to guides as students and teachers prepare and engage with the explorations, and they are also good guides for children as they use the information to relay what they learned in discussion with family members, answering questions on tests, and project work. 
• Creating and updating a guiding website. Having a website that includes all of the good resources and keeping that website up-to-date helps all members of the learning team access the information whenever they need or want it. This eventually saves time and supports program development in positive ways. 

Store bought programs can be helpful, but sometimes lack the timeliness and personalization that make learning more engaging, deep, and rich. In many ways, preprepared programs can serve as a launching point for a more engaging, deep, and meaningful program. 

And, as with every curriculum area, the world of science and science teaching is ever changing so it's imperative to make time to update programs regularly to reflect those changes.

Further, as much as any subject, science requires optimal social-emotional learning to learn well. Scientists need to know how to work as contributing team members who can assign and carry out important roles, debate, discuss, and work together to effect a meaningful result. Scientists have to be patient, good communicators, orderly, organized, and creative too. When teaching science, we are always focusing on apt SEL skills and attitudes at the elementary level too. 

There's lots to do to teach science well. Children's enthusiasm for the subject fuels the needed time and energy that's required to do this job well.