We have a goal setting component as part of our mandatory PD cycle. In the last three years, we have used three different systems (in the IBCS use of system, meaning a broad combination of software and human resources).
PART 1: CHOOSING AN AREA OF FOCUS #
Where on the ASB Professional Growth Continuum do you want to focus?
You have already self-assessed yourself on the continuum. Revisit your self-assessment. Which areas would you like to focus on?
Paste the standard and indicator below.
Area of Focus (ASB Teacher Column): #
1.2.5 Contributes positively to staff morale and takes an active role in the life of the school
Area of Focus (Instructional Strand): #
1.2.2 Utilize agreed upon instructional strategies to develop and deepen academic learning, learning behaviors, and core values.
#PART 2: IDENTIFY YOUR GOAL Narrow down your focus based on area of growth:
- Do you have previous observations or areas of growth from a division leader, >SAL, peer or coach?
I want to keep working on ways to teach & support reading in my subject area. This means working on finding assignment structures that produce meaningful engagement with text (without creating a ton of “busy work”), mini-lessons that focus on first-pass reading/skimming. This was my goal-area last year with Jenny. While I was able to meet the targets last year, I need to refine my focus from different TYPES of TEXT and on to different types of TEXT ACTIVITY
- What data/evidence is guiding this work? Look at student data (student surveys, work, observations, assessments, interviews) you have collected and reviewed. What does the student work and/or data tell you?
My fundamental anecdata is that kids struggle to get information out of (what I feel are) clearly written texts. Additionally, given an open selection of resources, students will choose one at random and, if they find it frustrating, give up on the TASK (rather than the resource). IN addition, students are well equipped to memorize definitions, but struggle to circumlocute or rephrase definitions in their own words. My assertion is that all of these observations reflect a common deficiency in reading skills.
I have cut a large block of rhetorical questions from the PD form defining SMART goals.
I’m not sure where this document goes or who reads. Maybe Ashley? Hey Ash! I really like running goals through classroom and docs. We need more teachers dogfood … to use the systems we ask kids to use. And if teacher use both sides more, I bet we can get some good student/IT projects out of the complaints file. Also, it’s so much better than bamboo. Fundamentally, UIs designed around legally binding signatures don’t allow me to keep tabs open as long as my brain would like. That said, I don’t know what happened to the bamboo goals. Was there conversation there? Was there a marking schema for mentors? All lost, like tears in rain.
But what! The goals are here! Yeah, because apparently I wrote my bamboo stuff in an untitled BBedit document that has stayed open in a window for the last… 6 months?
Goals for AY 21-22 #
Andrew - Teaching from Text in IB CS
I gain a LOT of information/context through narrative writing (fiction and non-fiction), film, and also "primary source" technical document . I want to incorporate more of that into my teaching and assessment practices. I want to identify a text source (novella, longform magazine articles, RFC, episodes of TV shows, etc) for several IB units. I want to explore using these as tune-in moments, as background, and as material that students can use to demonstrate their knowledge.
Andrew - Forms of Assessment
Build on the best practices of the Science and Math teams to develop at least FOUR distinct assessment activities or practices for Computer Science. CS represents a hybrid between content sciences (Bio, Chem) and the task/skill sciences (Chem, Physics). Looking back through ASB's CS documents, it appears that previous teachers performed two types of assessment: previous IB test problems, and small-mid term Java Programming.
Understanding and answering IB problems is a distinct skill over and above content exposure. Java programming problems are interesting, but only represent a small fraction of the curricular material.
To provide meaningful feedback to students across this broad subject, I need more ways to assess their current understanding. I will try to develop at least one new assessment "type" each quarter, testing these out with g11/g12 IB students, and also in my elective classes. I will share my designs and results with members of the Science and Math teams, looking for constructive feedback
Goals for AY22-23: #
Still reading, but trying to focus on raw classroom practices for leading discussions on reading. I want to shadow Peter and Micah and Mike and maybe Bingle on a day when a reading assignment is due. And look at different “task HW” and figure out which leads closest to the type of reading I’d like them to have. [[It’s associative and discursive,. It’s connection seeking, tree-spanning]]
My other goal is the community building strand, and I’ve decided that I just want to go to every kind of HS student event. I need to see more non-basketball sports, more music, more debate. That can be smart-ed So many numbers. Frequency! Period! Distribution! Sequence! Quantified door totals! But it’s also… like what this school needs to do more of. We need more people to give more to each other, to support where we each pour our hearts. Because that’s the only support we can control.
I didn’t have any good outcomes from my assessment goal last year, but I’m (optimistically! hopefully!) flailing with a lot of stuff this year that comes out of that same bucket of worry.
So, that’s what I want to work with. I have a bunch of other goals, but these are the ones I need to spend my energy on in order to get through to next year.
I know the Liekhart scales are supposed to help me specifically express my goals, but they do NOT help me develop my goals. Or refine them. That takes language.
Goals discussion AY23-24 #
Did I come up with new goals? Who's to say? Here are the goals I have put forwards in the past years. I think they're like passwords, and I'm allowed to shuffle them at some frequencies.
-
Different kinds of CS assignments (other than Past Paper)
- puzzle
- written reflection
-
Having students explore CS ideas through text?
- non fiction text
- narrative fiction text
- technical text
- world / general interest
- How to teach texts
- How to teach reading
- How to structure a read-together lessons
- How to scaffold material for group texts
- How to structure impromptu or prepared speaking
Have I been working on these? Umm... I think so?
07 July 2023
This post is from July of 2023. So, summer... I'm not sure if that counts for either of my goal cycles. ah, drat. Anyway, this is me trying to think through the pedagogical challenge at the heart of IBCS.
https://tieandjeans.wordpress.com/2023/07/29/thinking-concretely-around-the-cs-ia/
When I asked Aman about this question he said "we make them all do the same project and then they change the fonts." I'm trying that with 11HL this year. So... yay! Goal resolved!
03 Sept 2023
Here is one of my first meetings of the year with my advisor and coach, ColleageGPT. The joke is that I can't spell colleague. I don't think anyone ever clicked through to read the transcript which is me working through a careful 8 step plan for a lesson (IsComputer?) that I ABSOLUTLEY BOMBED. I had whole new slides, a bag full of props, custom cut cards and it DIED. Did my delivery suck? Was the assignment coherent? Poll the Pols.
12 October 2023
Another blog post that I thought was just an intro/commentary on the transcript. Which, of course, no one reads.
https://tieandjeans.wordpress.com/2023/10/12/test-composition-with-colleaguegpt/
This was my attempt to write a new 11th grade test using the LLM. It worked pretty well and has influenced a lot of other assessment choices, but it's often better in smaller chunks. I don't have big Unit Test threads anymore. How was the test? Did it provide an accurate gauge of the students mastery of the material?
11 Dec 2023
Another cry for help wrapped around a GPT transcript This is where we wrote exam questions that would build off the CMU Academy Python curriculum I used through the fall and try to write questions that would bridge the IB phrasing and the specifics of that software environment.
Did Andrew stop writing here? Oh no dear reader. There's the various public Discords where he servers as an itterant IBCS Rambler, sure. And the dozens of dozens of planning and compositional LLM work that didn't make blog entries. Why is that? Well, let's check in on andrew's OTHER secret blog to find the reasons why?
09 March 2024*
https://tieandjeans.prose.sh/teacher_sharing
Oooh, just look at that clean URL. This weird platform, prose.sh, is run entirely through command line tools! There's a direct path from starting to work on prose and starting to think about Castle Turing
You can see some of the early whorls of aligning interests here:
02 March 2024
https://tieandjeans.prose.sh/meaningful_work
But when I find a moment of incredible, human student specificity, the kind of expression that refines MY model in a way that helps the student.... I don't know how to share that stuff.
*24 March 2024
https://tieandjeans.prose.sh/Student_info_LLM
That was my attempt to write through the most explanatory case before my meeting with HR where I was told "your decision to not sign the forms does not make you not bound by them, but just amplifies your eventual infraction." These notes were not useful
So, here's my report on my Goals for AY2023-2024
I worked on them a lot.
I don't know if I got better.
I'm trying to find metrics that meaningfully track understanding, and activities that DEVELOP those understands by doing something OTHER than just training to raise that metric.
I think through talking. No one wants to talk about that.
See y'all next year.