PBL assessment

PBL, or project based learning, is an effective way to help students engage actively with a topic while they are learning about it. Here I will describe a project that I designed, my plan for guiding the students through the project, and my rubric for assessing it.

Project: Global Warming Community Opinion Video

My students will create questions to find out people's knowledge and opinions about global warming, then they will go out into the community, ask people these questions and videotape the responses. They will also research the correct answers and provide them in the project deliverable along with community opinion. Finally they will make suggestions about how scientists can better communicate about global warming and climate change.

Read more about this project here.

Project execution

I will give my students two weeks to do this project. During this time, this is how I will monitor and follow their progress: The first step is: they have to make a plan for the project complete with milestones and the days when they will finish the milestones. Then that plan will be the basis for my monitoring. Every day or two, the team will make a short report telling what milestone they are working on and how far they've gotten toward completing it.

During the next day's class period, I will walk around to the different groups and discuss with them their report, their plan, and how they can stay on track to finish the project effectively and on time.

This way they get practice with project planning and management along with other parts of the project.

Project assessment

Here is my assessment rubric that I will use to evaluate the students. They will also receive this rubric.

 

Using formative assessment to fine-tune teaching

 A formative assessment is usually an ungraded assessment that helps the teacher and the students to know the level of understanding of a certain topic being taught. This helps the students, because it is basically practice for the “real test” (the summative assessment). It also helps the teacher to know how he should modify his teaching to make sure that most or all of his students actually know what they are supposed to know. If he uses the results of the formative assessment to review and discuss difficult areas, students basically get double learning from the formative assessment.

My my TeachNow teaching certificate course, I recently designed three formative assessments: a Venn Diagram compare and contrast exercise for physics (an idea I got from this article on TeachThought.com ), a “Write your own test” exercise for Geometry (an idea I came up with), and an online self-grading quiz with answers for physics (basically the canonical example of a formative assessment).

Then after that, my fellow trainees gave me feedback on how to improve my formative assessments. The main result was: I need to integrate the results more directly into teaching that comes after the formative assessment, otherwise I waste a good learning opportunity.

This is true. It might require a little more effort or a little more time devoted to review, but the benefits for students could be substantial.

There are also ways of making sure that a formative assessment is accessible for all, including English Language Learners and learners with special needs. This can include adding visuals to an assessment, providing key words or sentence starters, modeling a task before students do it, and letting students discuss it with other students if necessary. It's important to include some of these scaffolding devices if there is a danger of some students being left behind. But they can also be removed when necessary to give students a different kind of practice.

Formative assessments are great because they are a low-pressure way for students to practice and learn. And they are a way for teachers to tighten the feedback loop between them and their students. This allows them to personalize and differentiate even better as they go forward.

When teachers implement formative assessments, it's best if they can allow students to get feedback as quickly as possible.

As Marianne Stenger writes in Edutopia, “Numerous studies indicate that feedback is most effective when it is given immediately, rather than a few days, weeks, or months down the line.” As far as feedback goes, the sooner the better for learning. This feedback could be from an online system, other students (peer grade or discussion), the teacher, or some combination. This tight feedback loop also helps the students just like the tight feedback loop of assessment results helps teachers.

REFERENCES:

Heick, T. (2017, August 23). 10 Assessments You Can Perform In 90 Seconds. Retrieved from https://www.teachthought.com/pedagogy/10-assessments-you-can-perform-in-90-seconds/

Stenger, M. (2014, August 6). 5 Research-Based Tips for Providing Students with Meaningful Feedback. Retrieved from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/tips-providing-students-meaningful-feedback-marianne-stenger

PBIS: What is it and is it useful?

What is PBIS?

PBIS, which stands for positive behavioral intervention & support, is a flexible framework of behavior management techniques designed to do what it describes: support positive behavior and intervene to recover it if students don't have it. PBIS is a framework that is supported by the US department of education and you can read a lot about it at PBIS.org.

There are many aspects of PBIS, but some of the key ones are listed below:

- Define, talk about, acknowledge, and reward positive behavior. The key idea here is that people respond better to encouragement and praise than they do to criticism and punishment.

- The bigger the group implementing PBIS, the better. In other words, multiple teachers and classrooms works better than one teacher. A whole school works better than just some of the teachers. A whole district works better than just one school. The more that students can hear the same message and get the same principles reinforced, the more effective the whole program will be.

- Every student will receive some level of "support." All students receive the general positive behavior acknowledgements and rewards (this is known as Tier 1 support). Some students with more problem behaviors will also get Tier 2 support, which could be behavioral plans, special groups to talk about behavior and goals, or special classes. A few students with severe behavior problems and high risk behaviors will also get Tier 3 support, which is individual intervention from behavior specialists or administrators. This could include a personal behavioral change plan and weekly meetings with their specialist. Thus, these are overlapping categories. Students with tier 3 support also get tier 2 and tier 1 support. Students with tier 2 support also get tier 1 support.

- PBIS requires consistent application in order to be successful.

I put an infographic about PBIS together which you can find here: https://infogram.com/step-by-step-charts-1h706eo88rwq25y

Much more information about PBIS can be found at http://www.pbis.org/, which is put out by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education Programs. However, I have found that the most understandable explanation of PBIS can be found on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_Behavior_Interventions_and_Supports .

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Is PBIS useful?

PBIS is being widely adopted and has a lot of supporters, but there are also a lot of people pointing out problems with it. These are some of the problems or potential problems that have been identified:

- Inconsistent giving of rewards can lead to students believing that they are being treated unfairly (perhaps correctly).

- Tying so many positive behaviors to rewards can lead to students only wanting to do something good if they believe it will be seen and rewarded.

- Tying class or school-wide rewards to the behavior of every student can lead to students punishing other students if they endanger the group rewards.

Let's take a look at these problems one at a time:

Inconsistent rewards:

As Michael Ryan Hunsaker notes in his blog: "It is far too easy for any of us to reward one student for a given behavior and not another student for the exact same behavior; we do it all the time as teachers. This inconsistency and violation of expectation justifiably cause distrust, frustration, and anger. Unfortunately, this type of asymmetrical reward is a feature, not a bug, of PBIS. PBIS uses asymmetrical reward as a motivational tool, to the detriment of the students that struggle with their comportment."

Extrinsic motivation:

Ideally, we want people to do good things because they personally want to do those good things (intrinsic motivation). But tying most good behaviors to rewards easily leads to extrinsic motivation (and exhausted teachers, who are responsible for handing out rewards--as fairly as possible). Several teachers have mentioned this problem. For example, in a forum on Proteacher.net, one said, "If I hear, 'What are we gonna get or what am I gonna get,' one more time after giving a student a complement, I'm going to scream. I just might scream, 'PBIS sucks and feeds right into the cycle of poverty by teaching kids to always have their hand out for something!' " (Daphne333). This might be an individual perspective, but other teachers have similar perspectives as well.

As another poster said on a city-data.com: "I'm not a big fan of PBIS. We shouldn't have to bribe kids to behave in school." (HappyTexan)

School-wide or class-wide rewards leading to antisocial behavior

Here's an example of the kind of downstream effect which is unexpected but quite probably for this kind of reward: "I have had teachers look at a line of students in the hallway and say to their teacher, “I would have loved to give you [a class] dollar, but Student X was out of line. Too bad.” Then the two teachers would passive aggressively talk about how they were 1 student away from getting a class dollar and just how sad that was because those dollars add up to a class party. Can anyone guess what the response from the group was at Student X? It certainly was not kind. In this case the whole class went into an loud uproar (in the hall no less) and started threatening this student for losing them class cash. Did I mention this student was autistic and overloaded with sensory stimulus and had their fingers jammed in their ears? They were. They were just trying to maintain." (Hunsaker, 2016, "We Need to Re-Evaluate School-Wide PBIS")

Overall, PBIS has been getting a fair amount of push-back. As was summarized by the Bakersfield Californian at bakersfield.com, "Opinions on the effectiveness of the approach known as Positive Behavior Interventions and Support are a mixed bag of high hopes, praise, reservations and fervent opposition." Likewise, advocates of other systems for promoting positive behavior feel like they are being pushed aside for the sake of a Federally sanctioned program (see Education Week, https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/08/28/2pbis_ep.h33.html ).

PBIS seems to have some good and useful aspects of it, but if I were an administrator, I would not recommend it as it is usually practiced. The Wikipedia article on PBIS lists some alternatives to PBIS, including one called "Responsive Classroom." This system is similar to PBIS, except that it emphasizes intrinsic motivation over external rewards. Considering that most of the identified problems of PBIS come from the reward aspect, I believe that the Responsive Classroom system is much more likely to be an effective program for all parties involved.

REFERENCES:

PBIS.org . Retrieved May 20, 2018. US Department of Education resource on PBIS.

Wikipedia. Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports. (2018, February 17). Retrieved May 20, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_Behavior_Interventions_and_Supports

Hunsaker, M. R., Ph.D. (2018, April 16). PBIS is Broken: How Do We Fix It? Retrieved from https://whyhaventtheydonethatyet.wordpress.com/2018/04/16/pbis-is-broken-how-do-we-fix-it/

Daphne333. (2013, December 10). The problem with PBIS - ProTeacher Community. Retrieved May 20, 2018, from http://www.proteacher.net/discussions/showthread.php?t=477703 . Discussion forum for teachers.

HappyTexan. (2012, December 16). PBIS - Why this program should be cut (university, high school, paying) - Education -universities, high schools, elementary schools, teachers... - City-Data Forum. Retrieved May 20, 2018, from http://www.city-data.com/forum/education/1753263-pbis-why-program-should-cut.html#ixzz5G0qwd34x . city-data.com education discussion forum.

Hunsaker, M. R. (2018, April 18). We Need to Re-Evaluate School-Wide PBIS. Retrieved from https://whyhaventtheydonethatyet.wordpress.com/2016/03/20/we-need-to-re-evaluate-school-wide-pbis/ 

Foreman, L. (2016, September 13). PBIS program gets mixed reviews. Retrieved from http://www.bakersfield.com/news/pbis-program-gets-mixed-reviews/article_03b68ada-464c-5a70-8b2a-04b08a2fca1a.html 

Samuels, C. A. (2018, February 28). Tensions Accompany Growth of PBIS Discipline Model. Retrieved from https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/08/28/2pbis_ep.h33.html

When to provide positive and negative feedback to students

Feedback is very important for almost everyone, and to a teacher, it may be even more important than for other people. Teachers and their students are in an almost constant feedback loop, with teachers and students giving feedback to each other in one way or another basically every day. Tests are feedback, grades are feedback, demeanor, tone of voice, facial expression, the way that you talk. All of these are ways that teachers give feedback to their students. Likewise, students are always giving feedback to their teachers as well, through similar things, such as demeanor, attitude, tone of voice, homework, class and test performance.

With all of that feedback going on, it's important to think about how to do it right, because done right, it can be a driver of success. But done wrong, it can slow you and pull you down.

So lets look at some principles of effective feedback:

1. Teachers should use both positive and negative feedback. It can be easy to forget the positive part, because our job is to help students improve. But positive feedback is just as important as negative feedback, if not more. This article from chron.com talks about some of the benefits of positive reinforcement in the workplace (which is not identical to positive feedback, but close enough). These include helping employees feel valuable, encouraging good behavior, and helping employees to fit it. Students are even more emotionally driven than employees, so they might even be more sensitive to the presence or absence of positive feedback.

2. Negative feedback should be present but not overdone. This is easy to say but not necessarily easy to do. It can seem like a delicate balance, but one way to approach it is to make sure that there is a good amount of positive feedback early on. This builds a sense of good feeling and trust toward the teacher, building a platform from which to provide negative feedback.

3. Positive feedback should be given somewhat randomly. People like rewards, but if the reward becomes predictable, it stops feeling like a reward. So build some unpredictability into your positive feedback by not always following the same pattern. If you surprise yourself sometimes, it's alsoo a good chance that you might be surprising your students as well, which is a good thing when the surprise is a good thing.

As Rosenthal and other researchers have noted, our expectations for ourselves and others have an uncanny way of turning out correct. This is known as the self-fulfilling prophecy. Feedback is one way that you communicate your "prophecy" to your students. Try to make it a good prophecy and you will have a better chance of getting the good result that you hope for.

Here's a quick-run-through decision tree for giving positive or negative feedback that I made to help myself (and you, if you would like):

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References:

Joseph, C. (2018). Why is Positive Reinforcement Important in the Workplace. Retrieved May 7, 2018, from http://smallbusiness.chron.com/positive-reinforcement-important-workplace-11566.html

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in Psychology: 10 Examples and Definition ( PDF). (2018, May 01). Retrieved May 7, 2018, from https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/self-fulfilling-prophecy/

From The Positive Psychology Program