Video Games in the Classroom: The Future of Learning?

With summer upon us, droves of students will hit the beaches, streets, and game rooms to pass the time until they come back to school for another year.  While I will probably force my 5-year old to go hiking with me or to ride her Frozen adorned bike, many students will take up the game controller and spend hours traversing fictional worlds.  But, is that a bad thing?  The common assumption that video games remove children from valuable learning and create students who can’t concentrate on meaningful school work may be, after all, a myth! According to Freeman A. Hrabowski III, the president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, “Too many young people are bored at every level of education.” He suggests that games may be an answer to improving teaching and learning.

“Digital environments are second nature to today's young people. Playing well-designed games, as well as creating them, can pack an educational punch,” explains Hrabowski. At UMBC, student game developers put hundreds of hours into game development because they are engaged. Using a “STEAM” approach (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, combined with Art and Design), Team Huebotics created the game HueBots which “features friendly-faced, rainbow-hued robots.”

But the work team Huebotics has done is not only a reflection of their engagement on this game, it is a reflection on how the education system must change with the generation of students it is educating. Hrabowski suggests, “American education, from pre-K to college, must find ways to inspire similar dedication and to bring content to life.”

While I occasionally enjoy a good video game, I too wonder if creating games around content area topics may be a way to illicit critical thinking, creativity, collaboration and/or communication.  I also wonder if designing classroom lessons around popular video games is a great way to engage students in what might be mundane instruction. 

To address counter points on this topic, Hrabowski explains, “Since Oregon Trail made its way into elementary-school classrooms across the country, this approach has drawn skeptics who question whether students are learning or simply being entertained. To address such concerns, we must ensure that sound pedagogy forms the foundation of any gaming experience.”

I offer these quick suggestions to bring game concepts into the classroom:

1. Apply a “leveling up” concept familiar to video game players to your classroom management plan. 
(classroom management)

2.Write an essay that takes a stance on this topic: Which is better PS4 or Xbox1? 
(Language Arts)

3.Calculate/Analyze the yearly earnings of game franchises like Call of Duty or Madden over the last decade. 
(Math)

4.Evaluate how laws of motion affect game play in racing games. 
(Science)

5.Create a new “Oregon Trail” game that represents travel through a different historical time period. 
(Social Studies)

To read the article “Video Games in the Classroom? Welcome to the Future of Learning” go to http://www.cnbc.com/id/102550028.

STEM Education with a Narrative Edge

In recent months, I’ve read a lot of articles outlining the positive impact of STEM education on student learning.  While some articles discuss variations on the STEM approach by adding in the Arts, a recent article from the KQED MindShift blog, highlights and interesting approach to the standard STEM formula by asking the question Could Storytelling Be the Secret Sauce to STEM Education?    

Katrina Schwartz, a journalist and staff writer for KQED’s education blog MindShift, shares the story of New York City public school teacher Lev Fruchter and his novel approach to teaching STEM education.  “[Fruchter] is convinced," according to Schwartz, that “literature is a great way to excite learners about STEM.”

Fruchter, having taught English and Math, realized that “stories are a great way to make science, technology, engineering and math ideas accessible and concrete to learners who might not think those kind of technical studies are for them.” Highlighting Fruchter’s use of stories like “The Lady, or the Tiger,” Schwartz explains that while Fruchter is able to help students interpret and write about literature, he is also able to provide students with options to “interpret a math problem in multiple ways, showing solutions in various ways, using functions and factoring.”  The story is the lens through which the students view the complex math and engineering problems that are customary in STEM education. 

As a former English teacher, I’m hopeful that I will someday step into a classroom and see students reading Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains.” This is certainly one of my favorite short stories and full of options to explore, especially with a project based STEM approach.   

To read more of Schwartz’s article and to see examples of texts used by Fruchter, go to http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/06/05/could-storytelling-be-the-secret-sauce-to-stem-education/ or click on the title in the first paragraph of this post. 

Leave a comment and let me know the texts you use in your classroom and how they could be used as a lens for the STEM approach to teaching and learning. 

Defining Differentiated Instruction

Differentiated instruction has been and most likely will always be a crucial component of our discussions in TBT and BLT meetings when we discuss strategies to address student learning in our classrooms. In the article “Defining Differentiated Instruction,” Rebecca Alber, Contributing Editor for edutopia.com, explains some key points in defining differentiation as it looks when put into practice.

Alber explains, “We have to start where each child is in his learning process in order to authentically meet his academic needs and help him grow.” While this statement is true, it can sometimes be difficult to put this statement into practice. Albert suggests starting with the student. Examine student records like IEPs to determine accommodations or modifications that need to be made for the student while in your classroom. 

“Making an assignment, task, or objective different for one student than the rest of the class is meeting that child where they are in their learning journey,” Alber expresses. Using an example from Of Mice and M en, Alber provides an excellent example to illustrate how to modify an assignment to allow a student in her classroom to feel successful. Most importantly, though, Alber recognized that success for this student would look differently than the other students for this assignment.

Finally, differentiated instruction “may mean providing extra time to complete an assignment, giving directions again, reducing the length of an assignment, or offering alternate assignments or projects altogether.” Albert continues to provide classroom ready examples of differentiation but also strengthens her primary point that differentiation is about fairness. While some teachers may believe that “making an assignment less difficult for one student is not fair to the others,” Alber believes that teachers need to evaluate what is fair for every student in their classroom. Some students just don’t learn the same way as others and may need differentiated instruction to access the content of the class.

Put it into practice!  

Differentiation can come in many forms. Try one of these strategies to differentiate instruction in your classroom.
1. Cloze notes or guided notes
to help students focus on quality of content rather quantity of writing.
2. Sentence Starters to help struggling writers develop ideas for writing
3. Graphic organizers to help students organize complex thoughts and ideas
4. Assessment choices provide options for students to show mastery of a skill or concept 

Visit http://www.edutopia.org/blog/differentiated-instruction-
definition-strategies-alber to read the entire article and to follow links to ready-to-use strategies to differentiate instruction in your classroom.

In the iTunes store, look up The Whole Child Podcast and search “Differentiated Instruction Works” to hear educators discuss how they put differentiation into practice.

The School-to-Prison Pipeline

The “School-to-Prison Pipeline” is the practice of removing students from the school setting and pushing them towards the juvenile and criminal justice systems.  In the recent article “The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Time to Shut it Down,” Mary Ellen Flannery discusses how ineffective zero tolerance policies and overzealous suspension and expulsion practices can be when addressing discipline issues in schools. 

Encouraged by disturbing trends like zero-tolerance policies, police officers in schools, and “made worse by school funding cuts that overburden counselors and high-stakes tests that stress teachers,” NEA members agreed in 2013 to stop the unnecessary school-to-prison pipeline.  

NEA executive committee member Kevin Gilbert says, “‘With education resources being cut nationwide, many educators are so caught up in trying to do more with less and many are not aware that when they remove a student from the classroom, they may be unknowingly feeding the school-to-prison pipeline.  We’ve got to make more educators aware and we’ve got to give them better tools and skills.”  

While no one expects that suspensions and/or expulsions should just disappear, Charlotte Hayer offers the advice that “you need to teach teachers how to build relationships with students who might not be like them.”  “Restorative Practices” is becoming a popular strategy to help educators “get to the root of disciplinary issues.”  In this strategy, teachers engage in crucial conversations with the students to teach empathy and responsibility, and to encourage the students to identify how their actions affect others around them.  

Sarah Biehl, of the Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio explains, “Suspending a kid or sending them to the office is easy and quick. The things we’re asking schools to do in place of those things are not easy and quick…The answers are complicated and I understand teacher need resources and tools to make these changes.”  

To read the entire article: http://neatoday.org/2015/01/05/school-prison-pipeline-time-shut/   

Connecting the Dots: Matching Rigor and Instruction

The January 2015 issue of Principal Leadership, highlights some interesting ideas on matching instruction to the rigor-level of learning targets.   According to Rosemarye Taylor and Mark Shanoff, authors of “Hitting the Learning Target: How to Facilitate Student Motivation and Resilience,” teachers at Ocoee Middle School in central Florida were concerned that “many students were not proficient in reading or mathematics because the teachers misunderstood the language of learning goals” (28).  Administration at the school was also concerned because “student achievement was not improving continuously” (28).  

Teachers and administration decided to take three key steps to improve student achievement in their school: 

Focus on learning targets - Teachers must have clear intentions for student learning.  Teachers should fully “understand the academic language of their learning targets and how student work might look and sound at those specific levels of rigor” (29).  

Scaffold instruction - Beginning with direct instruction that includes teacher modeling expectations, teachers should scaffold instruction that begins “with high teacher support, then decrease gradually until students could independently demonstrate mastery with low teacher support” (29).  

Systems Development - Administrators adjusted the systems in the school to allow for more collaborative planning time and allocated other resources to follow through with monitoring teacher and student success. 

Teachers and administrators at Ocoee Middle School now feel that “Through carefully scaffolded instruction; heightened, clear expectations; self-monitoring; and quality feedback, students’ self-esteem grew, as did teachers’ beliefs that they could impact all students’ learning, including those who had previously underperformed” (30).   

Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School - Chapter 2 Review

Chapter 2 of Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School lays out a different thesis than chapter 1; in this chapter the authors begin their examination of who teachers are, what they deal with every day, and the competing views of teachers in general.

 

Hargreaves and Fullan go to great lengths to describe the problems that teachers face in their profession  Low support, technology inequity, and performance based pay are just a few of the major issues that the authors highlight.  The authors also go on to describe "flaws" in the U.S. educational strategy that create a culture for educational ineffectiveness.  Overwhelming compliance issues, merit based pay, and school environment are highlighted at great length.   

It is all of these issues, however, that I believe Hargreaves and Fullan highlight to prepare the reader to understand that in the midst of the myriad struggles facing the teaching profession, teachers are still important.  And to sustain their importance, we must understand a few key tenants:

• Good teaching is technically sophisticated and difficult
• Good teaching requires high levels of education and long periods of training
• Good teaching is perfected through continuous improvement
• Good teaching involves wise judgments informed by evidence and experience
• Good teaching is a collective accomplishment and responsibility   

In the end, Hargreaves and Fullan begin to lay the groundwork to argue their points to transform teaching in every school.  The authors admit that "to change anything, we must first know what it is that we are changing" (23).  In chapter three, they will go deeper into the nature of teaching in an attempt to know what we attempting to change. 

OTES Changes!

On June 4, some important changes were made to OTES; understanding these changes will be important for implementation of OTES in school districts.  The changes are listed below.  Go to http://education.ohio.gov/Topics/Teaching/News/Changes-to-Ohio-Teacher-Evaluation-System-for-2014 to read more about the changes. 


Changes to Ohio Revised Code (ORC) 3319.111


TEACHERS RATED ACCOMPLISHED OR SKILLED BEGINNING IN 2014-2015
A board of education may elect to evaluate a teacher receiving a rating of accomplished every threeyears as long as the teacher’s student academic growth measure for the most recent school year forwhich data is available is average or higher.

A board of education may elect to evaluate a teacher receiving a rating of skilled every two years aslong as the teacher’s student academic growth measure for the most recent school year for which datais available is average or higher.

In any year in which a teacher who has not been formally evaluated as a result of having previouslyreceived a rating of accomplished or skilled, a credentialed evaluator shall conduct at least oneobservation of the teacher and hold at least one conference with the teacher. This also applies toteachers who received an accomplished rating in 2013-2014.

TEACHERS ON LEAVE OR RETIRING
A board of education may elect not to conduct an evaluation of a teacher who: (1) was on leave for 50percent or more of the school year; or (2) has submitted notice of retirement on or before Dec. 1 of theschool year.


Changes to ORC 3319.112 and New ORC 3319.114
OPTION TO USE ALTERNATIVE FRAMEWORK
For the 2014-2015 school year, a district or school may choose to use either the 50 percent teacherperformance and 50 percent student growth measure framework (ORC 3319.112) or the followingalternative framework (ORC 3319.114):

oTeacher performance measure shall be 42.5 percent

oStudent academic growth measure shall be 42.5 percent

oOne of the following components shall be 15 percent:

Student surveys;

Teacher self-evaluations;

Peer review evaluations;

Student portfolios.

Beginning with the 2015-2016 school year and any school year thereafter, a district or school maychoose to use either the 50 percent teacher performance and 50 percent student growth measureframework (ORC 3319.112) or the following alternative framework (ORC 3319.114):

• Teacher performance measure shall account for 42.5 to 50 percent

• Student academic growth measure shall account for 42.5 to 50 percent

• Remainder shall be one of the following components:

Student surveys;
Teacher self-evaluations;
Peer review evaluations;
Student portfolios.

• If a district or school chooses to use the alternative framework, the teacher performancemeasure and the student academic growth measure shall account for equal percentages ofeach rating.

ODE-APPROVED INSTRUMENTS

The Ohio Department of Education must compile a list of approved instruments for districts and schoolsto use when evaluating teachers using student surveys, teacher self-evaluations, peer reviewevaluations and student portfolios.

Districts and schools must choose one of the ODE-approved instruments if they are using thealternative framework.