New Sections

In the Upper School, we'll all have a new group of students next week. There are advantages and disadvantages to mixing things up in this way, but a clear consequence is that teachers need to re-establish class expectations, just like we did in September. As Ellen never fails to mention, these first two weeks are an important window. It's always easier to start off a bit strict. I have concluded over the years that students like a bit of rigor in the classroom. It lets them feel that they are stepping up to something, instead of just carrying on in a comfortable slouchy way. It's a balance, of course. You want your classroom to be somewhere your students enjoy being.

I was reviewing the files that Heather created last year and came across a number of ideas for working with new students. Daniel sometimes groups the students in a few different configurations on the first day so that the class has seating options during the quint: students arrange themselves alphabetically by first name, alphabetically by last name and also in the order of their birthdays. During the first few days of class, Tim sometimes does a version of Two Truths and a Lie: students write down on an index card two facts about themselves and a falsehood. These can be read aloud and guessed at, several right away and the rest from time to time during the quint. I think I will avail myself of Scott's "Find Someone Who" idea: I will distribute index cards with names of figures we have studied written on them and have students find a partner whose figure is linked to their own: Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, for example, or Kaiser Wilhelm and Czar Nicholas. The pairs of students can then explain the connection. This enables us to do a warm-up while also reviewing the year so far. For me, it makes more sense to do this mixer on the second day of class. For one thing, the content of the curriculum is serious at the beginning of Quint III and the tone of our first meeting needs to reflect this. Secondly, having a focused and business-like first day is one of the ways I implement Ellen's September reminder about setting expectations. I find the energy at school tends to be high and loose enough on the first day without my doing anything to stir it up.

Student Evaluation

Having completed Teacher Evaluations, my thoughts have turned to student evaluation. Turns out, "student assessment" is a huge topic but a few general principles seem to show up in education journals and websites with some regularity. These include:

1) Grades with no explanatory feedback are of little value, but explicit corrective comments are powerful teaching tools.
2) Feedback is optimized when students are given opportunities to try again and get it right.
3) Feedback delivers the most value when it is prompt. The longer students have to wait, the less they get out of whatever comments we provide.
4) Rubrics help students focus their efforts and gauge their own success.
5) Involving students in the evaluation process increases its value.

I have to say, I think we're doing a lot of things right at Northwest. We've got principles # 1 and 2 covered and we're working on #3.

In terms of #4, I know I don't use formal rubrics very often. Heather and Suzanne developed one for analytic essays, which I sometimes use to show my students what distinguishes an "A" from a "B" paper. Grade 11 uses a kind of rubric with the research paper. Benji has developed an invaluable "Illustrated Guide" to essay writing and Daren just created an excellent primer on text analysis. None of these are exactly rubrics, but they all offer explicit criteria and some models for students to follow. And of course, there is the Essay Checklist! (All these can be downloaded from my Teacher Page, thanks to our colleagues who agreed to share them.)

I guess I am least sure of #5. Of course, conference offers a prime opportunity for informal self-assessment. Once in a while, I have my students submit a narrative self-evaluation on the back of their essay checklist: they assess the strengths and weaknesses of their papers and share any challenges that came up in writing them. This is a valuable exercise, but I think it might be the only opportunity for formal self-assessment that I offer my students. I am thinking about turning over part of my Quint II evaluations to the students' own comments, but I find myself hesitating--which is interesting. Why am I so reluctant to share this responsibility with the people it most concerns? Am I afraid they'll do a bad job?

Teacher Evaluation

Even though I should be used to it, I still feel apprehensive when Teacher Evaluation rolls around. At times, I have even entertained rebellious thoughts about this process: why should we entrust so serious a task to students who don't take it seriously? Why should evaluations be anonymous? Why should we have to submit these to our supervisors?

And these were just the internal rebellions...at times my rebelliousness has affected my behavior as well: last year, Peter and Amy's Peer Mentors created an updated Teacher Evaluation form. Several of my colleagues tried it out with their students but I didn't get around to making the switch. I suspect that on some level, I realized this more focused form might generate more focused feedback.

This week, I am experiencing the usual apprehension, but I have decided to embrace Being Evaluated this year--not so much because I am suddenly hungry for more focused feedback, but because I think there is a danger if someone in the position of evaluating others tunes out the experience of being evaluated.

Today one of my students complained about 3 points she'd lost on a recent test--a test on which her overall grade was a 92%. I have to admit, I was irked. 3 points? A 92? For this, I have to negotiate and defend?

Then I thought about how much criticism sticks in my craw: who is that? what are they talking about? It is tough to receive "negative" feedback when you have done your best--and yet this is the position students find themselves in all the time. So this quint, I am breaking out the Peer Mentor evaluation form. I am not expecting to receive more praise this way, but I am open to remembering what it's like to be vulnerable to assessment-- and to finding ways to make the experience of assessment as empowering as possible.

Thanksgiving Themes

Warning: this post has little to do with teaching Humanities. At best, it may have some relevance to Colonial North America and the phenomenon of nativism.


As we head into the holiday season, I am aware of the divide between my own experience and The Ideal Holiday which I see celebrated in commercial culture and public spaces. The disparity can leave me a bit unnerved.

Fortunately, there is NPR! While chopping away on Thursday morning, there was lots of great programming about Thanksgiving history on KUOW94.9, which I am going to summarize for you in lieu of presenting any original ideas.

What struck me in the themes of this programming is that Thanksgiving has always been an artificial celebration. It is true that the original settlers may have shared meals with indigenous people and may even have offered feasts of Thanksgiving. However, as good Puritans, the pilgrims would have been as likely to fast as to feast and might well have found the idea of a Thanksgiving "feast" a bit presumptuous.

In fact, the Thanksgiving holiday was an observance tirelessly promoted by a New England woman named Sarah Josepha Hale, who expressly intended it to be a didactic holiday promoting the virtues of an idealized New England life. To her, it was an important feature that the holiday would involve a return to the countryside and to a traditional domestic sphere where women had influence. (Hale opposed women's suffrage, though she was interested in expanding women's access to education and influence.) Hale pitched the idea of a national day of Thanksgiving to five successive presidents until she finally won the attention of Abraham Lincoln, who declared Thanksgiving a national holiday right in the middle of the Civil War--at a time when the nation was literally tearing itself apart. So Thanksgiving was created to simulate a sense of national harmony and unity which did not exist. This makes me feel so much better.

While my holidays may never resemble the Currier and Ives model, I am relieved to know that the Currier and Ives model was an idealized mock-up from the very start.

In Praise of Primary Sources

The other day, I spied a book on Daren's shelf: Aspects of Western Civilization: Problems and Sources in History, edited by Perry Rogers. As I was flipping through this text, I was reminded of the value of primary sources. Primary sources provide students with a strong particular viewpoint on history. Purportedly objective or blatantly biased, they offer a vivid picture of a slice of time. And best of all, many primary source documents are short--or can be excerpted.

Recently, we included a New Deal cartoon from one of Daniel's lectures on an 11th grade test. Students were asked to analyze the point of view expressed in the drawing: what issue is this artist referencing? what is the cartoonist's critique?

On a more sober note, consider the Balfour Declaration:

His majesty's government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

This single sentence is a goldmine of information which students can discover for themselves in a fairly short amount of time.

Decoding primary source documents can easily be turned into a hands-on collaborative exercise. Besides their inherent value, primary source activities offer a low-cost way to reduce homework load on any given night. They support all kinds of productive classroom activities that require no preparation for the students--and they can really animate material presented in lecture.

The Avalon Project at Yale Law School has a huge selection of primary sources from 4000BCE to now. I have a few other sources for primary sources in the "Random Great Stuff" section of my Teacher Page, though these are mostly geared to the 20th century. The ABC-CLIO database that Nancy is test-driving this year includes primary sources for almost any unit. Our Northwest School Library also has (among other things) a multi-volume set of primary source documents entitled Daily Life through World History in Primary Documents and a Witness to History series which features lots of primary sources as well. See Nancy for other primary sources.