July+15

What's different in where you were with your thinking about the work of this group on June 25 and where you are with your thinking right now?
 * Reflection Prompt:**

HW - When the opportunity about this group came out, it seemed interesting. But by the end of the first day, I felt lost. By the end of the second day, I felt worse. Then, I called my son and he suggested I read everything. Now, I am not lost anymore and I have ideas for my kids this year and I am really glad I came.

LG - I had a moment in summer school that made it apparent to me that critical thinking is not solely a function of skill level. One of the neediest students was working in a tangram center and I asked him a question - what would happen if you turned this piece this way? What would change? He started experimenting and I left him. I few minutes later, he yelled "I did it, I did it." I gave him a choice beyond just saying something like, "You can do it."

SJL - Because you asked him that kind of question, he will begin to ask himself that kind of question. I was thinking that critical thinking is not something you do because you're taught to. You have to need to for some reason. In summer school, I used food sharing to help students learn about fractions and missed numbers. It's about the motivation or the need to solve it.

TP - I am making the transition from how I am going to use this in my class to how will teachers feel about this. We have to present this to the teachers as an opportunity to experiment and be liberated from the multiple choice tests. We should get teachers to "pilot" this and show the results. It will be great for the kids and the teachers.

MT - This sounds like the phrase "work with the living."

TP - Now we have the PLC organization, it may disseminate faster.

MT - As long as you don't have teams that divide and conquer and assign critical thinking to one person.

SJL - What if your kid is in the other class? We need to move. Right now, we know there is a problem and we need to fix it.

HW - You can't tell teachers what to do.

JSW - You can give a teacher a tool. You have to go from compliance to commitment.

LK - I came from Chesapeake where we had coaches and many teachers just don't want them. I used the coaches, got results, and other teachers hated me. They asked what I did and I said, "I used my coaches." What does society expect from us - grades, lifelong learners?

JC - We're going to have to create some open-ended tasks with scaffolding. I think we have to structure questions that teachers can pick and choose from to talk to their students about their responses to their tasks. We shouldn't think monumental things. We need a list of reasonable tasks and hit a lot of different aspects. Then, what you are doing is teaching teachers to ask questions.

LG - If we wanted to come up with open-ended tasks, we need to put them in to something they are already doing any way.

JC - Can we have a critical assessment piece in SchoolNet?

LG - What I saw in ACAMB did have some tasks like this.

SJ - SNAP is a K-2 assessment around numeracy. Because teachers saw the questions because they had number lines and ten frames, teachers are now using these things in their classrooms. If you have the tasks that require these tools, teachers will use the tools.

TP - We have content-based formative assessment items teachers are supposed to tie assessments to their SMART goals.

SJ - We're presenting this as an assessment that is to make it clear where kids are and not to be used in the evaluation of a teacher.

TP - These critical thinking assessments hold the district accountable as opposed to individual students or teachers. If formative assessment helps teachers see where the students are on the scale, that would be great to tie in to SMART goals around critical thinking. Teachers need the ability to use this assessment instead of the SOL-like ones they use now. This can't be one more thing, it has to be something they see as a good thing.

BN - There is still a perspective that we have to address whether kids will pass the SOL or not. I am going to go to a meeting where I will be asked to identify kids on the bubble.

PW - Ira Socol said "Educators often think that school is the point where it should be the path." We forget the goal of helping kids to move along to not meet the test but to thrive in this world today.

HW - If those questions are really good, they may allow you to do both.

BF - Rambled on about "clean up time" in schools - what would transitions look like in a "critical thinking" classroom"

TP - Tony Wagner says if we're teaching critical thinking, we're teaching kids to question authority and a lot of people don't want that.

JP - It's about how we have kids question authority.

MT - I never hint at question authority, I frame it as "I really care about you and I don't want you to get cheated in life."

HW - My father asked me why everything with my kids was a negotiation and I said it's because I don't want them to be taken advantage of.

JC - We have to set up situations where we're forcing ourselves to accept different answers based on their evidence.

TP - Teaching critical thinking is values-based to some extent and we have to be aware of this as an issue.

JP - We have to get over the hurdle that we can have a 20 point drop in our SOL scores and have better students. We have to get people to understand this.

BF - Described the history of Design 2004 --> FQL

MT - Perhaps this can be reflected in our pre-school time to promote this much higher level goal.

TP - If there are groups of teachers who opt to use these as formative assessments, and we can capture that data, perhaps we can show growth over time and show the correlation that connects to the SOL. I added a resource from Tony Wagner about the CRWA. We have two things we're working on - what does it look like and how do we create something systemic enough to see the impact?

LK - Because we're teaching critical thinking, do we always have to show growth? We have to recognize that there is going to be failure and we have to learn from this.

TP - There's the quanitative and the qualitative and we have to be able to look at both of these.

BF - Is it an OR or an AND between critical thinking and the SOL?

MT - NECC experience felt like we're talking about the typewriter in many ways.

PW - Spoke to p. 62 of Schooling by Design.

JC - Key words -- mission, habits of mind, questions, assessments, his thingies are tasks and activities.

Reflect on how our "thingies" should be organized k-12 and by discipline. Write a "This I Believe" statement about how you think the organization should be arranged.
 * Follow-up on the assignment from last time:**

"This I Believe" statements and attempt to sort out the organization as appropriate for disciplines and school levels before we build the first "thingy". We will all build one together to figure out the process and establish norms. After the first "thingy" is built, we will spread out and build our own "thingies".

Elementary and secondary groups got together to reflect on: Mission Habits of Mind Questions Assessments Tasks Activities ...through technology

See their on the left.

Paired up one elementary and one secondary teacher to serve as critical friends about the work thus far.

Task: Revisit the parameters (what changes - your thinking about the task or the parameters?) Outline/draft a "thingy" you would be willing to apply in your situation next year

Tomorrow...8:30 - 9:00 - wiki feedback 9:00 - we'll start