Azinger Again

This was a great week–a great week with options. I enjoyed having the opportunity to choose from a variety of ways to illustrate my understanding of a topic.  Being a very visual learner, I couldn’t wait to make a chart, graph, or diagram.  Ironically, however, I was so excited to respond to the third prompt that I went ahead and passed up the chance to visualize my understanding.  Fortunately there were tons of great examples that I could look at and learn from–so that was great.  As for options in assignments, I hope to do that with my own students a lot, though I’m sure I don’t do it often enough.  I’m co-teaching this year, and my hope is that (please please please) my co-teacher and I will eventually get into a rhythm, and we will both start bringing some great ideas.  Until then, I’m working hard, or not (I need the option ) on making more options available to my students in their learning.

Speaking of co-teaching, after three years of asking, I finally was given a co-taught class.  I was very excited and couldn’t wait for all of the collaborative excellence that would be oozing out of our room.  Surely, two teachers with 30 students is like 20 minute brownies in 14 minutes, right?  Surely two professionals planning lessons together would make an MIT think tank envious, right?  Surely a content area expert and a learning styles expert, together, would be a teaching force to be reckoned with, right? (is it ovious that I’m studying parallelism with my students right now?).  All of those dreams of awards and ceremonies and rose bouquets are somewhere down next to a tattered plan book, under some ungraded essays.  It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just not what I thought.  There is a gap somewhere that we need to fill before we can begin working full steam, and I’m not sure how to do that.  Add to that that I have been honing my very own unique patented kung-fu teaching style over the last four years, and it makes for a very different experience than I had anticipated.

Thank goodness for AI.  I would not be totally truthful if I said that I hadn’t expressed some frustrations.  I’m sure I still will-there might even be some expletive thrown in a time or two.  But more than anything, I want this to work.  So, starting about a week ago, I began thinking of what elements of our two-periods together were successful.  Focusing on those (one was a wonderful assignment that involved options!) has helped me focus on where we need to go.  And not just looking at the postive things we’ve done, but thinking about how we could become great (keeping the dream alive (blech, pardon the cliche)) and figuring out how to get there, or at least take the steps to start heading in that direction–that has been great for me.  This has been great for me.  I know it’s not formal evaluation, but looking at the general understandings of evaluation on pages 40 and 41 of the Preskill and Catsamas text (Evaluation is for enhancing knowledge and decision making, asking questions about everyday practice, is purposeful, etc.) I can’t help but feel that what I do at the end of most days hits most of these understandings and can be considered some form of evaluation.  With that in mind, applying AI has been super.  Like my co-teaching thing, I can look to the postives to help make my teaching better and be more constructive.

Maybe I’m still green, and maybe the literature we’ve been reading is a little biased, but it seems like AI is really a no-brainer.  It makes so much sense to look at evaluation from the standpoint that AI suggests.  Like a video game patch, or bug-fix, it doesn’t need to be installed.  You can still play with the old patch, and the game only freezes under rare circumstances.  But if you do install the patch, everything runs so much more smoothly, the game rarely ever freezes, and winning is that much easier.

I should start carrying a notebook around.  I always seem to get inspired when I’m miles away from my home–usually in the car or on a walk or in an orchard.  Out and away from home, my mind wanders around, ending up in random, exciting places that I am so sure I will remember.  Yeah, never happens.  But if I had a notebook-a small one with a pen attached because there is no way in the world I would remember both things-I’m not sure that writing while driving (“Honey, can you hold the wheel, I’ve got an idea…”) or walking around in nature is quite where I am at the moment.  I want to write and write and write, but I also want to enjoy the meandering my mind does when I’m driving, or the fleeting thoughts that run through my head when my wife and I are happily strolling through nature, or the great first lines (I had one in college I made myself remember, “fish  food, like flakes of skin off a sunburnt back” that I never knew what to do with…) that runs down my chin while picking apples from the tree.

Anyway, wits aside, this has been another exciting week in the life of a student of evaluation.  I have been very excited about AI and its potential to get people talking about the good things that are happening around them.  I think I am a pretty positive person but have been in some pretty negative situations before that were really depressing.  Everyone seemed to sit around and complain about what was wrong, and what they hated, and what should have happened.  At the end of the day, no one was any wiser, no changes had been made or even planned, and it was pretty evident that people were unhappy in general.  How great would it have been to have a facilitator there who would have asked all of us to think of what was working!!  What we wanted more of in order to keep the good stuff going!!

Now, there are some people from these former situations who would be so used to complaining that the opportunity to look at the bright side might be less than appealing.  That’s one of the neat things I learned from the Gervase Bushe article I read.  He pointed out that sometimes it’s necessary to let people get their complainy fix, then use that as a jumping board to focus on what they like.  It helped AI seem more real as a tool by looking at possible pitfalls and addressing them.

Thanks to my classmates, I was also able to think about AI in few additional capacities–one of Matt’s articles discussed the fact that innovative groups are more successful at AI.  This made sense to me, since AI is itself innovative.  While I think that AI could be effective in most situations, I was interested to think about the fact that it would have varying degrees of success.  This in turn led me to wonder about the staying power of an AI infused evaluation.  One of Hannah’s articles got me thinking about this since the evaluation was explained, but the results and changes weren’t.  So I began to wonder if it was like a home improvement show where a group comes in and fixes everything and then leaves and a year later, the home is back to the same mess it is in.  I guess this doesn’t have much to do specifically with AI as with evaluations in general, except that AI is taught as an ongoing process.  This makes it that much more important to think about how to not only change and grow, but how to maintain an attitude that longs for change and growth.

creative commons image courtesy of ricoeurian

I was curious about how this week’s assignment would be overall, but here at the end of the week, I am really happy with it!  I liked reading more about AI, and I liked being exposed to countless other articles that dealt with AI.  For some reason, writing my annotations felt like, to rip off a great simile from Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory throwing rocks in a stream.  Loud, clunky, choppy, heavily punctuated.  I’m not totally sure why that is–fatigue from teaching? pressure to be succinct? I hope I revised them to a decent level of coherence?  I kept thinking that pushing rocks around is a form of meditation in my sister country, Japan–that made the revisions more fun!!!

Over the summer there was this frantic ___ that drove everything I did–getting the house and everything ready for Seijiro (née ‘The Baby’), taking the summer classes, dealing with closing out the school year, then the crash course in parenting, the visits to and from family etc.  It was insane, late, sleepless, non-stop, and really pretty exciting.  Everything was high priority and due any minute.  I think that’s why it’s taking longer than usual to get my rhythm this year than in the past.  I am learning how to be equally as busy, but in a more structured way.  The center of my work day is no longer from 10 pm to 4 am.  I sleep more now.  I have a schedule I adhere to.  It’s such a different busy.  I kind of miss that frantic.

I am happy to still be busy though–I am really enjoying the classes I’m teaching this year.  I have co-teacher for the first time and working with him is an exciting challenge.  Too, I am teaching a creative writing component in the stead of the narrative descriptive unit I am usually teaching at this point in the year–so that is exciting.  Plus, I am also finding a lot of pleasure learning about evaluation.  Maybe it’s hokey, but I think about what I like most about teaching, and try to model my teaching so I get more of that!  I am also thinking hard about how I could get my students talking about my class, then use that data in conjunction with our district curriculum to create a better classroom.  I wonder if it would work to use components of AI in group meetings like we talked about in Tom’s class last spring…

Well, I think I’ve blathered on long enough for now.  If you’ve made it this far, thanks!  If not–no worries, I don’t always read my work after I publish either ! おやすみなさい

This has been a super week to be a dad!  Seijiro has started making the raspberry noise complete with spit bubbles and smiles.  As I’ve said before, all that hallmark card, saccharine sentiment about the miracle of birth and the joys of parenthood is completely true.  I am the dad who spends five minutes trying to get his son to make the spit bubble raspberries for everyone we see.  Ugh.

Aside from that, this has also been a crazy good week for school and for school.  For ‘I’m a teacher!’ school, I had meetings and open house and lots of late nights at work and at home.  But it’s always a wonderful sense of accomplishment to make it through busy weeks like this. Open house is a blast (I love meeting the parents )Plus, spending a rainy Saturday napping with the fam is much more gratifying after a super hectic week.

For ‘I’m a student!’ school, things too were hectic, but good hectic.  I found myself again struggling a bit with how to write my introduction for my evaluation.  I tried to use the Preskill case study as a model but had a hard time synthesizing my own introduction.  I thought I had a decent draft, however, for Thursday.  With the kind comments of Kona and Brendan in my head, I looked back at that draft on Friday, and saw a lot of spaces I could fill in.  I poked around at my peer’s introductions and tried to use their drafts as well as my comments to their drafts to help fuel my own rewrite.  I feel a lot better about my second draft, though I certainly am looking forward to future comments.  Something that did help for this second draft was a little looking around for evaluations posted online.  I looked at a couple (can’t remember specifically what they were for) and was able to get a better idea of how I wanted my intro to look.  I toyed with order and content quite a lot over the last two days and ultimately decided that I needed to submit the draft that I had, since I’m sure I made so many adjustments back and forth on Sunday that it probably looks just like it did when I first finished it Saturday night .  It’s done, now though, I am again excited to feel like I am making headway.  Again, I am finding context into which I can apply my very limited knowledge, and that is great!

And then, there is the Preskill and Catsamas text!  I love it already!  Everything rings so true here as for how evaluations usually go.  We are struggling with the issue of advisory at our school.  Many of us really want to have it, but a majority feels like it is another prep with no grade that the kids don’t take seriously and the teachers don’t take seriously and as a result is a wasted 27 minutes every week.  The thing is, though, that it should be a wonderful opportunity to connect with students–we just aren’t sure how to do it very well yet.  Anyhow–when we take surveys, we are always asked what is wrong with it, why don’t kids feel investment?  what should be different?  etc.  And yet I feel that instead we should be focusing on what went right and how can we make that ‘right’ last longer!  AI, thank you!!

The core principles are a wonderful way to look at evaluation.  The focus on communication of the positive aspects of a program being evaluated is really exciting!  The positive principle is like my home planet, I swear.  As per Life of Brian, I do a pretty good job of ‘always look[ing] on the bright side of life.”  I try to believe in the decisions that are made for us, or act to try and change them if I can–but I work really hard to find the positive aspects of things even if I disagree with them.  Of course I’m not infallible, but it’s definitely something I try really hard to do!

The enactment principal too–It makes sense to model the behavior we want to see.  As much as I hated some of the advisory lessons we were given last year, I had to make them as good as I could because I wanted to have success with them and I wanted to tell other teachers that I tried it and it wasn’t that bad.  This stems a bit from my positive nature, but as AI states, if we are sure that everything is going to be terrible before we even give it a shot, then, it probably will be terrible.

Can’t wait to incorporate more AI in my eval!!!  However…time’s up!

OK, I can not tell a lie.  Reading the Program Evaluation Standards over the last two weeks has been tough.  I am super interested in learning about evaluation-being able to effectively evaluate the things around me will help me make better more informed decisions as an educator and a citizen: what’s not to like (and no wonder it’s at the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy!)?  I am also pretty good at sucking it up and powering through the task at hand, but for some reason, this was a tough text to get through!  So why oh why did I struggle so much with the reading?  I think that it must have been that I was reading these standards without a context for understanding.

When I was getting my ed certificate in undergrad, we were constantly asked to construct a phantom classroom for various assignments.  This was impossible for me because sure, I could, in my head, think of a mixed ability, mixed socio-economic, mixed race class in a suburban public high school.  But I wasn’t fooling anybody–how would I know what that was really like?  How could I make up what my students would be like without ever having students?  How would I know whether or not we could get 90 copies of The Sandman by Neil Gaiman until I faced my administration and asked for money?  How would I know if we lived near a cemetery, or a library, or if we could even take walking field trips until I got a job and could ask?  How would I know any of this until I got into an actual classroom?

Applying the reading, then, to the case study was like getting my first teaching job.  All of a sudden, case study in hand, these standards that I struggled through made perfect sense in their complexity and detail.  I perused the standards again, this time with a goal in mind and could better understand the importance of the standards as well as see their interrelatedness.  I was able to breeze through these once elusive standards.  The lists of criteria and common errors were invaluable to my understanding, and the case studies were often equally as helpful.  And it wasn’t only the standards that made sense.  I was able to better understand the remarkable sophistication of the evaluation process.  When I was working on my early definition of evaluation (that evaluation is the task of using criteria to gauge how well something achieves its purpose) I had no idea of the extent of criteria needed for effective evaluation.  I mean, these are criteria for criteria!

I also had glanced through the Functional Table of Contents, but was overwhelmed and couldn’t imagine needing that many steps and re-steps to complete an evaluation.  However, after looking at the case study and anticipating many problems unless this was done or these people were talked to or this group was given a chance to explain…I gained a further respect for this long list of steps.

What else…I also noticed a lot of similarities between the Program Standards and the AEA guidelines.  That was a relief   It was also helpful to learn that various organizations are all focusing on more or less the same ideas when it comes to evaluation–I think it would be tough if each organization conducted different evaluations!

So overall this week, I feel like I made it over a big hill and found context on the other side-yay!  I also learned a bunch from reading through the analyses and blogs of my peers.  Also, I think I earned a deep respect for the process of planning and conducting an evaluation.  At the same time, I made it through the first two weeks of teaching (whew), began readjusting my sleep patterns (though, who am I kidding there, my sleep patterns haven’t been normal for the last 2 and a half months ), read some wonderful pieces of news, satire, and opinion about the election,  and have been pretty happy doing it!  I love this, and I sure hope that I keep this one going….