Two years ago, I had the amazingly good fortune to have a cart full of netbooks in my classroom.  I was 1:1, and even if the netbook wasn't awesome (these broke, lost internet connection, lost files, wouldn't connect to any site with a large file size...etc.) it did allow me to push my course management to Edmodo.  I posted all assignments there, had discussions (and posted backchannels for other discussions), I assigned grades, and used the teacher forums for my own professional development.

Then, last fall, it became clear that occasional computer lab use and BYOD were the best I could do.  A large percentage of students had iPhones (85-90%) and a few had iPads or other kinds of smartphones, so there were often a critical mass of devices so students could send email, compose documents in Google Drive (although I wouldn't want to try that on a phone screen, my students seemed to be okay with it), take pictures of handouts, etc.  So while I wasn't 1:1, I had students using their own devices or borrowing one of the ones I had (I had four computers in my classroom, two laptops I own and two desktops from the school, as well as an iPad and an iPhone).

But what became clear quickly was that Edmodo just wasn't going to be helpful.  Outside of a 1:1 environment, it made much more sense to host everything on MentorMob playlists, and then embed those into a course-specific webpage at tmiclass.com.  

This is the course website for American Literature, first period.  You can see the last video we used, along with the playlist for the Gatsby unit, and the playlist of returned tests/essays.  I can also embed Google forms on these pages, such as the one I use for document creation from AutoCrat.

Students could access those easily on their phones, and even more easily from  home.  Just by using MentorMob with BYOD, we reduced the number of copies needed to almost zero.  I didn't even give paper copies of the syllabus and course description last semester.  Just the shortened link to the Google Doc version.

However, that didn't make up for every piece of paper - in fact, most of the paper used in my classroom was used by my students.  That's where this strategy comes in.


I hate collecting paper.  It gathers, especially when you have 155 students in a fast-paced college-prep school.  So I came up with a few ways to not ever collect paper from my students.

• Ask them to email it to you with a particular subject line.  I like using hashtags.  So if the assignment is the Gatsby Journal #1, I have them use the subject #GatsbyJournal1.  Then I can search and even auto-label emails in Gmail.  

• If they don't have a device or can't use it for some reason, I will walk around and take pictures of their papers with my iPad.  Then I can import them as a single event (this works best if you upload after every class period) in iPhoto.  And I have them forever, unless I decide to clean out my iPhoto albums.  It also takes less than two minutes to make it around to everyone who needs it.
  

Here is what it looks like in iPhoto.

So yes, technically it uses paper.  But it means you don't have to collect ANY of it, and the students don't need to worry about keeping or losing it.  In fact, I encourage them to recycle it as soon as they add it to their blog or email it or whatever.  

If I end up needing to comment on them, I can always upload the pictures to Google Drive and use comments or VoiceComments on them.  For the most part though, these are credit/no credit reading journals that don't require me to read them closely.  I can also have students collect and submit them at the end of the unit, making it easier to grade and enter.

Do you have paperless tricks?  If so, I'd love to hear them!

When I told my colleagues in the English department what I was doing - giving intense and personalised feedback on all major writing assignments over the semester - for my Essay Exposition final, they overwhelmingly thought one thing:

Those kids will NEVER read it.

As English teachers, we know how frustrating it is to read essays for hours, make thoughtful comments, and then hand back the papers that have only one letter students care about.  After they see the letter written in red at the end, they often discard the comments.

That was so foreign to me when I started teaching.  In high school and college, I was almost as interested in the comments as I was in the grade.  And I always read the comments first, and tried to figure out what the grade would be before I got there.

Why did the feedback mean so much to me, and so little to my students?  

So I did something drastic: I stopped giving them a grade on their essays.

I taught an Essay class where they never got a grade for a piece of writing.  I gave them credit for meeting the requirements, yes.  But never for the quality of their writing.  And contrary to what many people would think, I don't have all A's or F's in my class.  I have a pretty even spread, pushed towards the higher end - as expected in a class where students voluntarily sign up to take a class where they write dozens of essays.  I had one F (in the high 50's), two D's, a handful of C's and the rest A's and B's.

That being said, I wanted them to divorce grades from writing.  I wanted them to have the freedom to explore the topics and voices they didn't yet own.  I wanted to see the creativity they had, not the structure they had learned.

So what did they do when I gave them the intensely individual, focused and detailed feedback form?  The one that I spent 30-60 minutes on per student?

When I handed them back, there was several moments of near total silence.  They read what I wrote.  They shared with their group members.  They came to ask questions about what I wrote.  I didn't find a single feedback paper on the desks, in the trash, or on the floor in the hallway.

And not one of them asked about their grade.  

Instead, we had conversations about their writing.

One of the proudest moments of my career.

Tonight I don't have much time to write.  

But the reason why I don't have time is important:

I'm reading every major assignment my Essay Exposition (SAX) class has produced.  I'm going through 22 assignments, including a 4-10 page final essay about the purpose of school and how Redwood should be changed to meet the purpose of school more accurately.  All of them have been added to a Mentor Mob playlist that the student manages, and hosted through a master MM playlist that I manage.  It's a system that makes it really easy for me, but is also helpful for them.

Then, after I've read everything (much of which I haven't read - I worked with them intensely on just a few select pieces through the semester) I'm giving them feedback on specific essays (both on paper and as comments on their Google Docs).  I'm analysing their voice and how it's changed.  I'm seeing so many amazing sentences, paragraphs, ideas, and structures that it's pretty easy to tell them how much they've improved and how good I think they are now.

Is it crazy to try and give them feedback like this?  Probably.

But if any teacher had done this for me at any point, I might have gotten much better at writing much earlier in life.

Here's what I'm noticing:  I really really like their writing.  And the assignments did just what they were intended to do - make them a better writer with better ideas and better ways of expressing those ideas.

Here are the writing assignments from the semester:

• 3-5 page definition essay on a memorable experience
• 2-4 page photo essay about literacy
• 2-3 page Snapshot of a Redwood Learner essay
• mixed media format Blank White Page project
• short Narrative List (similar to McSweeneys lists)
• 2-3 page Style Alike Essay on a McSweeneys piece
• 1-2 page New Food Review
• 4-10 page musicology project (with a YouTube playlist of all the songs)
• short Clearing the Attic prompt
• 1-2 page observation piece
• 2-3 page Your Choice Assignment #1
• 2-3 page Your Choice Assignment #2
• 2-4 page If You Really Knew Me essay
• 2-3 page Reading Timeline and Vignettes
• 100-500 word Exploded Image
• 300 word Write Something New (i.e. write something. anything. that's new)
• 300 word Exploded Image on the topic of homework
• revised writing conference piece (a choice from any of the essays we wrote)
• 4-10 page final essay on the purpose of school
• 2 page evaluation of the course
• 300 words-1 page analysis of their writing voice

Wow.  That's actually a lot.  And that's not even everything they wrote. 

Also, any success I've had in this course was due entirely to Andrew Thomasson, who taught me how to do all of this, helped me design and teach the course, and even did writing conferences with me and my students.

Okay.  Back to work.

I've always loved writing, but I haven't always been good at it.

And I've never been good at teaching writing.  I think that's because I never was taught how to write.  I was given writing instruction, sure, but the attitude of my teachers was that writing was something you just got better at when you practiced more.  They focused on helping me develop my ideas and not so much on how to structure those ideas so they made sense to the reader.

That might be giving them too much credit.  I don't remember ANYONE telling me how to write.  I do remember being encouraged to write on a variety of subjects in low-stakes assignments, but that was mostly in college English classes.

I also remember my creativity being discouraged actively, mostly in high school.

My high school grammar teacher (we spent half the year in literature, and half in grammar) would give us daily journals.  We had to write 20 lines, and the topics were things like, "Imagine sliding down a hill" or "What is a song you like, and why do you like it?"

So I decided to start writing an epic short story.  One that would incorporate the topic every day, but would be about this community of elves.  Ones that had mysterious adventures, like sliding down hills while composing their own inspirational tunes.  Where characters were developed and put in situations where they could be tested, or they could demonstrate their true nature.

After two weeks, she collected our journals.  I waited for her feedback anxiously, as I believed my Elf Soap Opera was my greatest writing achievement yet.

I still remember what she wrote at the bottom of the last journal entry:

This is not appropriate and if you continue to not write about the assigned topics, I will give you a zero on every one.  In fact, I will give you a zero if you even use the word "elf" in another journal.

I cared too much about my grade to push it any farther.  But it was just another event, in a long string of events, that convinced me that I needed to stop believing that people would understand me or see me for who I really was.

I got an A in that class.  But my writing didn't improve; in fact, my confidence as a writer dropped significantly, as a result of having a teacher who meant well, but couldn't see me as anything except a kid trying to get out of an assignment.

I never wrote on a creative topic again in high school.

**

I had forgotten about that until a student in my Essay class mentioned that he had done something similar and had a similar consequence for it.  He asked me what I would have done if he had done that for my class.  My answer was simple: I would have written him a comment that told him what I liked about it.  If it didn't meet the requirements of the assignment, I would ask that he make sure he did that next time.

This was in the context of a discussion about how writing instruction is done here at the school.  What my students said was that, at this level, there are just expected to know how to write already.  They said that, other than a few comments on essays and a grade, they hadn't had much instruction in how to improve their writing.  They knew how to write a five-paragraph essay.  But when asked to do a creative topic, they would completely blank out.

They started naming things they wished they could have had in their English classes:

• individual writing conferences, where they are given specific feedback on what to improve and how to deal with problems they struggled when writing in general
• freedom to write something without obsessing about a grade
• the ability to explore interesting ideas without worrying about how many sentences in a paragraph, or how many paragraphs were required
• instruction on how to take their ideas and make it work in writing
• help in developing and honing their voice as a writer

Basically, the exact same goals I had for them at the start of the class.


We did one-on-one conferences (took three weeks of class time), and when I asked them if that had been helpful (and worth the three weeks it took), they said it was probably the most helpful thing we did all semester.

I disconnected writing from grading.  Nothing they wrote for me received a grade (with three exceptions, which I'll talk about in a minute).  If they completed the assignment, they got 100%.  If they didn't complete it or it didn't meet the requirements, it got a 0%.  My theory was that frequent writing practice would build their confidence and ability, and that they had to stop seeing writing as a transaction; good writing evolves and develops, and the idea only ever grading first drafts is not attractive to me.  

Andrew Thomasson and I do a lot of writing together (like, at the same time in a shared Google Doc), so this has really helped me refine my theory on writing instruction.  We have written numerous guest posts (including one next week for the 12 Days of Dreaming project over at Educational Dreamer) and what we have found is that our first drafts suck.  Sure, they say what we think we want to say, but they never say what we NEED to say.  It takes a lot of refining (and often starting over altogether) to find the version we think represents us best.  If our first draft was published, it would be far less than mediocre, and not even a glimmer of what the final product ends up being.

I apply that principal to my students - some drafts are worth refining, and others aren't.  That's why the three assignments I am actually grading are:

1. The essay they chose to have a writing conference on.  Their task was to revise it after their conference, given the feedback and discussion we had.  I only graded it on the things I asked them to work on.  Most of the time, that was a bit of structure, a bit of organisation, and a bit of concept.  
2. The final essay, which is a synthesis of about 50% of the writing they did over the entire course.  It included short descriptive vignettes, which Andrew and I call an "Exploded Image."  It included making an argument and supporting it with evidence.  It included a narrative structure that used elements of a narrative toolkit we developed.  So in effect, I'm grading their ability to perform all those various tasks successfully, as well as their ability to synthesise the information.
3. Their analysis of their own voice and how it has developed in this class.  The assignment is here if you're interested.  It yielded some interesting results.  The reason I'm grading this one is that I want to see their analytical ability, as well as their ability to find patterns (another of the course mega-themes).

Those are the only assignments graded in a more traditional way.  The rest is credit/no credit.  My students told me that it was liberating to be able to write without worrying about points being deducted for a misspelled word, or an incomplete transition.  They also said it allowed them to try on different styles and experiment with ideas that aren't typically found in an "academic" writing assignment.  Some of those yielded the most successful pieces of the semester for my students.

As to helping them find their voice and develop their ideas, the way I did that was through a lot of discussion and feedback.  We wrote every essay in class.  During that time, I would work with individual students on how to best get across their idea and how to make it sound like their authentic voice.  We also had collaborative partnerships, where students would help each other by reading and making comments on ideas only - not on grammar or spelling or other mechanics.  Sometimes they would comment on structure and organisation, but mostly it was about helping the writer develop ideas.  We had discussions about purpose and audience, and how style influenced and was influenced by both the purpose and audience.  I showed them my writing, and they took it apart.  We did the same with some of theirs.

Here's what I didn't teach:

1. That writing should be a single draft activity, where we write something then move on to something else
2. That structure is more important than content
3. That the five-paragraph essay is valuable
4. That all genres of writing are the same, and use the same structures
5. That there are strict rules that all writers follow
6. That the most important thing is completion
7. That writing is an individual activity
8. That we should never experiment or try new ideas
9. That there are "right answers" in writing
10. That the teacher is the audience for all of their writing

I have the great privilege of teaching students who have a lot of training in basic essay structure, who have great vocabularies, and who have great academic behaviours.  Their struggles are more with anything that is different from what they are used to - they haven't been asked to be creative or collaborative much, unless it's in structured ways.

I know that this is probably more freedom than many teachers have, and that my students' academic background is much stronger than most.  But I also see that their writing at the beginning of the semester has improved dramatically.  They went from writing five-paragraph-style essays, and now have much more complex systems of organisation that will serve them well in college.  Their descriptive and observational writing is so much stronger, and vivid.  

And they feel something I never felt in high school: that their voice, what make them unique, is valued by a teacher.  That they can be themselves - even if that is something still in the process of being developed and refined.  That they don't have to worry about a grade and can take risks.  That they have peers who understand and support them, and will help them become better writers.

That their writing is, like them, a work in progress.

I've written about my 6th period class a bit in previous posts.  They've been doing projects on an area of humour that we have not studied together.  

Today, we had a study in contrasts.

The first group started presenting on Friday, but because of some administrative tasks, they weren't able to finish.  Their presentation was about stand-up comedy.  More on them in a minute.

The second presentation group covered ten types of humour, with some examples.  Here is what they did (see if you recognise it):

1. Gave a handout with ten definitions of types of humour (slapstick, parody, satire, etc.).
  
2. Read the definitions off the PowerPoint (exact replica of the handouts).  Around the third slide, they lost the audience.  When the audience started to recognise that the presenters did not fully understand everything they were teaching, the audience responded by asking questions.  It started with factual questions - does that include x? What does y mean? - and progressed to more chatter than actual questions.  The audience actually seemed frustrated to not be learning and resentful of the waste of their class time.

3. At this point, the group rushed through the last few slides so they could get to the videos.  They hadn't made them hyperlinks, so they had to manually copy/paste them into another browser window.  Several members of the audience shouted at them to do control-click.  They either didn't hear or chose not to listen.

4. When they finally had the video ready, they didn't give context.  Just pressed play.

5. Less than half of the audience was paying attention.  They continued regardless.

6. After the first clip, they asked students to write their answer to the comprehension question on the back of the handout.  They had only made enough for each group to have one.  So they told the students to do it as a group.

7. Then they showed a second clip and gave them a second comprehension question.  

8. As class was about to end, they just went back to their seats and told students to "turn in the papers or something."

Is it their fault that their presentation wasn't effective in teaching the students, or engaging their attention?  Not necessarily.  They haven't been trained in how to present information, and have been less than attentive for much of the semester.  

Their presentation was the first one from that class that was anything less than mind-blowing (like producing a comedy video, leading an improv workshop, analysing memes about Marin...all fantastic and very funny).  For a student presentation, it certainly wasn't bad.  Yes, they committed some presentation sins (technical problems, reading off the PowerPoint, not being fully prepared, not keeping the audience engaged, etc.) but they met the requirements set out in the assignment.  They are decent students who are just not terribly engaged in school, and despite having the freedom to choose an elective, ended up in one they enjoyed but didn't really connect to.

**

It had been so different with the first group.  When they finished, I was astonished to realise that they hadn't just learned the tools of humour analysis.

They had learned effective lesson structure.

They had unknowingly used Explore Flip Apply - the same structure I have used to teach them all semester.

I didn't tell them my structure, and so certainly never encouraged them to follow it.

But here's the lesson they presented:

Explore:
Students were directed to a bitly address that took them to a collaborative google doc.  The presentation group asked them to write a joke - any joke.  It didn't even have to be funny.  They watched and laughed as their classmates entered jokes anonymously (since it was a public link, they didn't need to sign in....an intentional move by the group to let people have the freedom to be experimental).

Flip:
The group then presented a few techniques used by stand-up comedians, such as timing, exaggeration, and exploration of the unexpected.  They solicited feedback from the audience to clarify their misconceptions, and posed a few questions to check their understanding.  They showed several clips (since they ran out of time, they assigned one as homework - the "Hot Pockets" Jim Gaffigan routine - best. homework. ever.) and asked the students to identify some of the elements used, as well as analyse their effectiveness as humour tools.

Apply:
Finally, they had students go back to the google doc and look at their own joke again.  They asked them to revise their joke to add some of the elements.  Then they asked students to come up to the front and tell their joke as a stand-up routine, and then asked the audience to analyse the techniques used.  Four students volunteered and shared, and several more would have shared had there been time.

Finally, we did our Seminar Assessment reflection questions (which they had helpfully included in their presentation, even without it being required), where the group listened to the feedback respectfully.  They even offered some additional materials to let advanced learners find out more.

**

They Explore-Flip-Applied a presentation, on their own.  And it was as (if not more) effective than what I've taught them.

So how is it that one group was so successful, and the other group wasn't?  

Was it because of the strength of the relationship built with their classmates through discussions, seminars, and collaborative group work?  Sure.  The second group spent more time checking Facebook on their phone than participating in class.

Was it having clear passion for the subject and an intense desire to communicate that to their peers?  Absolutely.  The second group were far less attached to their topic than the first.

Was it having the necessary toolkit of skills?  Yes.  The second group struggles to think critically and write effectively.

Or was it because the first group took responsibility for their learning, and had ownership, and the second group didn't?

I think that's the key point.  All of the other things were essential to getting them there - relationships, passion, skills - but when they took ownership and had pride in their work, they naturally gravitated to the instructional technique they had learned first-hand from me.  And while the second group learned something, it was the first group that had really been transformed.

This presentation wasn't just something they did.  It became who they are.

And they don't need a grade to prove they learned something.

Nor do I need a test to prove that I taught something.

And now that I have a fresh start coming in a few weeks, I'm afraid that I won't be able to repeat this kind of awesomeness.  It's daunting to see the final product and think about starting over.

But maybe next semester, there won't be a second group.

"But, I just don't understand how you're grading them."

My mentor teacher (all employees new to the district gets one, regardless of experience) had just visited my class unannounced to watch my Language of Humour students present their final projects.  They had selected a text (this group chose a Brian Regan standup clip over which someone had done stick-figure animations), developed a discussion around audience and purpose, and created a writing assignment.  The group that presented engaged the audience and had well-developed activities.

They had some flaws - a few times, the presenters got into a conversation about what they liked about the video instead of paying attention to what the rest of the students in the room were doing.  I LOVED that they were so passionate about it, although I would have loved for them to channel that more into the discussion.  But what came shining through is their passion, their analytical ability, and their willingness to bring their classmates into discussion.  It was pretty cool to watch.

Before their presentation started, one group had a question about the writing activity - I asked each group to collect and grade the work completed during their presentation.  That's all the guidelines I gave them.  Most groups did full credit or no credit (a reflection of how most things are graded when I am doing the grading) without asking what/how they were supposed to do.  But a student in the group who had presented the previous class period wanted to know HOW he was to grade the work.  I told him to grade it however he liked - five points, a million points, whatever.  I trusted him and his group to be fair.

And as I was talking to my mentor teacher, he just couldn't understand two things:

1. How they were grading each other
2. How I was grading them

As I listened to his questions, I realised something:

My students never asked how (or even if) this would be graded.  In the two weeks they had been working on it, grades had never come up once.


My mentor just couldn't comprehend how that was possible.  How students could be motivated to do their work without some kind of accountability grade-wise.  How I didn't have a plan for how I would translate their performance into grades.

So I thought quickly: what would I want if I were a student presenting this information?

I would want to know my successes and failures.  I would want to know how effective the teacher believed my presentation to be at delivering the learning objectives.  

I would want a narrative.  Not a letter grade.  Not a rubric.

So I decided I would give them a narrative.  I'm a little obsessed with this right now, and I'm going to write some narratives in that style for my students.  Depending on how it goes, I may post a few of them here.  

I know some people will question what I'll actually put in the gradebook, as we still live in a point-based, letter grade world.  To be perfectly honest, most of them will probably get full credit.  The only ones who will receive less than full credit and the presentations that didn't include all required elements.  So far, every presentation has met all the requirements.  I don't feel like playing a game of "well, you lost two points for not looking up when you spoke" or "I know you chose a writing topic, but it could have been better so I'm taking off five points."  

They will still get feedback on their areas of strengths and weaknesses.  But their grade will reflect that they learned a lot, and helped their classmates learn something new. 

This is as close to a letter-grade-free world as I can get.

**

My mentor teacher didn't like my answer.  He wanted me to have a rubric.  Assign points.  Do something that was quantifiable.  

But what is going to make my students grow more?  What is going to develop their ability to own their learning?  

What will they remember more: a letter grade or a personal letter?

I know what I would want.

And what I am MOST proud of: the fact that the grade doesn't matter.  It doesn't matter to them, it doesn't matter to me.

So why should it matter to anyone else?