Archive for category university
Assignment marking: Do the math
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, personal, reflections, university on September 27, 2016
Something I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while is the unseen labour that goes into marking student work.
It’s semester 2 marking time in Australian universities, and I’ve just finished a stack of mine. ‘Stack’ in the figurative sense, because these were a combination of learning logs and and video blogging, all submitted and marked digitally, so there were no actual stacks of anything.
Being the audience and assessor for these students’ work was a privilege, and I don’t think any teacher should forget that having the authority to do this work is always a privilege. Sometimes it is also a joy. And it is always something that we do, knowing the important positive impact that quality feedback has on student learning.
It is a labour of love, but it is a labour to be sure.
Generally a student assignment takes 30 minutes to mark. So they say. Once I get my hand in, I can usually get through an exam response in 20 minutes (they don’t tend to require any feedback), and an essay in 30 minutes, but a set of professional plans (e.g. annotated lesson plans, units of work) takes about 45 minutes and you just can’t rush it.
A typical formula for university marking in my field is that formal assessment feedback and grading for each student should get an hour of your time each semester. That’s 30 minutes for each assignment if you only set two assignments. If you want to set more assignments, it’s on you to mark them quicker. If you’re in the edu-biz, you’ll know that this is where group presentations and short response exam papers start looking attractive.
In a typical semester I have 120 students. That’s maybe 90 students in one big unit, and 30 students in a smaller unit. As a high school teacher this was also roughly the number of students I had – roughly five classes of 25 (some with 30 students, some with closer to 20, e.g. senior classes).
Using me as an example: I set two assignments each semester. And we know that on average I plan to spend 30 minutes on each.
My semester runs for 9 weeks (because it’s followed by prac.), but they can also run for 13 weeks. You can’t really set an assignment in weeks 1 or 2. If the assignment is big, worth 40% or more, you can’t really set it in weeks 3 or 4 either.
Let’s say assignment 1 is submitted in week 5. We’re expected to get work back to students in 2-3 weeks. So they say. Which puts me giving their results back to them in week 8 (a very important deadline if the next assignment is due in week 9).
120 students
x
30 mins each
=
60 hours extra work
/over 3 weeks
=
20 hours of extra work each week.
Add about 3 hours for each of the following:
- getting your head around the task and long times spent on first few tasks marked
- moderation with a colleague
- administration of grades, uploading feedback to LMS etc.
Rinse and repeat just one week later if you have set assignment 2 to be due in week 9.
So if you’ve got about 120 students on average, and managed to keep yourself limited to your 30 minutes per assignment in all units in both semesters, then you will have worked about 23 hours of overtime for 12 weeks out of the year.
I say overtime, because the whole time you’ve been doing this, life, and other work, goes on…
Classes still need teaching. Emails still need answering. You still have to front up to important meetings. Research papers still need writing, grant proposals still need submitting, you may be collecting research data and attending conferences too. If you’re a school teacher, it’s classes, emails, meetings, lesson prep, school dance supervision, year 8 camp, sport coaching, bus duty…the list goes on.
As depressing as this exercise is, I think we should all do the math on this for our own teaching context.
People need to know the reality of what teachers mean when someone asks them how they’re going and the only response they can muster is a stoney-eyed “I’ve been marking”.
Spouses and family members need to be acknowledged for how they support the teachers in their lives during marking seasons.
Teachers need to grasp the reality of their workloads so they aren’t taken by surprise each time the overtime cycle hits, and help each other learn how to manage the physical, mental and emotional toll it takes (or collectively rise up and change this system maybe, hey?).
And beginning teachers need to be aware of what they’re in for.
I am so grateful to my boss for giving me lighter teaching load this semester (just 35 students!) so I can focus on my research publications, but next semester I’ll have 120 students again. I can’t wait to meet them, but I sure do wish their assignments would mark themselves!
If students designed their own schools…
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, school, university on September 12, 2016
Chatting in the mid-year break with Bianca and some other PBL-peeps, this video was recommended to me. It’s only 15 minutes long, and now I’m recommending it to you too:
The video shows what can be done in a school where teachers and leaders are prepared to really let students design their own learning. Like, really let them do it.
The students in this alternative academic program design their own Independent Learning Projects (that they report on weekly to other students), as well as their own Individual Endeavours (ambitious term-long projects, e.g. learning to play the piano and putting on a recital).
Something that interested me was, about 1 minute in, one of the students explained that in the course they look at “the four main bodies of learning”:
- English
- Math
- Social Sciences
- Natural Sciences.
Make no mistake – I was totally inspired by this video and even showed it to my students this semester. So inspired, that I changed our first assignment to be based on completion of an Independent Learning Project! But when those four areas are offered up as the “main bodies of learning”, I can already see points of tension for making this kind of program work across the board. What of the other learning areas? What of health and physical education? What of the arts? Foreign languages?
Without engaging with conversations about what is ‘essential’, ‘core’, or ‘fundamental’ in education – and working out some kind of common goal or philosophy to anchor us – I suspect alternative programs like the one featured here will (continue to) struggle to gain traction.
Although these programs aren’t (yet) the silver bullet we need to shed our teacher-centred shackles, I believe bringing these approaches into our teaching is vital.
Personal take-away thoughts:
- Students have passions and interests that they are entitled to pursue.
- Students are capable of designing their own learning, if we give them some parameters.
- Students are more motivated to learn when they have some control in devising the questions for investigation.
- Independent learning approaches seem an immediate good fit for students like this (this is is a class of nine Honours students, who self-selected into the program), but would disengaged or recalcitrant students need more scaffolding?
- Doing my own Independent Learning Project in high school was a transformative experience for me. It was called a ‘mini thesis’ by my teacher, and I chose to study the French Revolution. I did this for just one term in just one subject – surely this is achievable across the board without rethinking our whole approach to schooling?
Assessing soft skills in PBL
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, university on August 29, 2016
This week in class we explored the Essential Fluencies as an alternative set of ‘soft skills’ to the General Capabilities in the Australian Curriculum.
One of my students followed up this investigation with the following juicy question:
Essential fluencies seem to structure skills within select criterion, however I am curious as to whether PBL uses these as guides (depending on the student’s PBL objective) or whether students are meant to meet all of these at different stages of their PBL (to achieve a final product)?
If this is a flexible criteria, would using a feedback grid be the most effective way of communicating the development of an idea (as it focusses less on curriculum goals, more on constructive advice)?
I decided to post my answer to part of this question here on the blog:
You’ve asked a good question about skills and standards. My understanding of PBL (and other inquiry-based models) is that assessing skills is just as important as assessing content knowledge.
There are two (opposing) axioms that relate to this:
- ‘What gets measured gets done’.
- ‘Not everything that matters can be measured; not everything that can be measured matters’.
At the moment I’m inclined to agree with the PBL movers and shakers – that developing ‘soft skills’ should be seen as a vital curriculum goal, just as important as the acquisition of discipline knowledge and technical skills. The argument here is that if we don’t find a way of measuring/assessing soft skills then teachers will continue to sideline them. Because ‘what gets measured gets done’.
The BIE crowd have developed a range of assessment rubrics for the four skills that they identify as most important to PBL specifically: creativity and innovation, presentation/communication, collaboration, and critical thinking. You can find them here:
http://www.bie.org/objects/cat/rubrics
Of course, the opposing view is that such assessment rubrics lead people to forget the second axiom ‘not everything that matters can be measured’. I know sometimes I’ve watched presentations for example that are awesome, but their awesomeness can’t be explained using the BIE assessment rubric. It’s like all rubrics actually need a criteria labelled “X factor!” for when a piece of work or project does something amazing that we didn’t plan to (or cannot) measure. And sometimes by focussing students so explicitly on assessment rubrics, they can get obsessed with how to ‘game’ the criteria to reach the highest standard, rather than taking risks in their learning to work toward a big-picture goal.
Opposing axioms.
As there is no ‘Ultimate God of PBL’, we are free to use whatever framework we want to think about “soft skills”. We can take up the Essential Fluencies, we can take up the skills foregrounded by BIE, we can use the 4Cs proposed by p21.org, or we can use the General Capabilities from the Australian Curriculum.
But ultimately I’d argue that yes, whatever framework you choose, you should find a way of explaining to students the standards you are looking for on a range of criteria, for the particular project they’re working on. Assessment rubric sheets should be designed to make the criteria and expected standards transparent to the learner, and to aid the feed-forward process throughout a project as well as the feed-back process at the end of a project.
*****
I know I haven’t answered all of the parts of this student’s juicy question, and we’ll be talking more about it in class. It may generate another blog post. In the meantime…
- How would you answer this student’s question?
- Do you agree that providing assessment rubrics for soft skills is useful for learning in PBL (or otherwise)?
Let the PBL begin (again)!
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, english, reflections, research, university on June 17, 2016
It’s the end of semester one, which means two things for me:
- It’s time to prepare my ethics application for my funded research on project based learning in secondary English.
- It’s time to finalise preparations for my own project based learning plan for next semester.
I’ve been trying out elements of project based learning (PBL) for a few years now, and this will be the first unit that I feel fully embraces the model to underpin class organisation and one of the two major assignments:
Draft: Program/Assignment Outline for Semester 2
This assignment will no doubt shift a little as I develop marking criteria to align to the unit outcomes. Ah, constructive alignment, don’t you love it?
This blog will largely be used in the forseeable future to record and reflect on my PBL research and teaching.
It took nine weeks
Posted by kmcg2375 in personal, reflections, university on March 17, 2016
How long did it take for you to settle back into work?
This is what people will ask me, down the track. What people have already been asking for a few weeks now.
I started work just after bub turned 11 months, and now she’s 13 months. It’s my ninth week back.
It took nine weeks to get ‘with it’.
I think I have successfully: decided where to get coffee and lunch; remembered most of my passwords; stayed back at work a couple of times; stayed up late working after bed time; said hello and had a chat to most people at least once; started teaching, with three lectures under the belt; presented a conference workshop; established a new dinner time routine.
Working. Enjoy responsibly.
Eye of the Tiger
Posted by kmcg2375 in personal, university on February 1, 2016
I want to make a play list of songs that would be good for getting ‘psyched up’ for work.
There’s currently one song on my list – used as a theme song for the TV show Suits, ‘Greenback Boogie’ reminds me of the thrill you get when hard work pays off. Though there are certainly no suits being worn in my office, and I’m well aware that working 20 hour days is not actually that glamorous…
I used to play ‘Get in the Ring’ a lot on the way in to work, but although it was good for preparing to deal with some tense issues at the time, I don’t think I benefited from the antagonistic feels in the long run…
So hit me with it – what tunes are best for getting excited to go to work?
New Milestones – Twitter, Blog, Work
Posted by kmcg2375 in learning community, online tools, personal, reflections, school, social media, technology, university on June 8, 2014
Blog
It was very satisfying this week to get a notification from WordPress reminding me of my blogiversary.
Six years of blogging!
The time sure has flown. And although I still have much to learn about online writing, I can say with confidence that nothing beats the professional development and reflection that public writing has afforded me.
As if one milestone wasn’t enough, this was also the week that I clicked over the 10,000 tweet mark (!)
Sadly I missed the exact moment and didn’t get a screenshot, but here’s how it’s looking today:
2008 – what was happening?
A quick look at my profile stats shows that I joined Twitter in May 2008, and created my blog not long after in June 2008.
Around this time I was:
- 27 years old
- living in Southwest Sydney
- halfway into my second year of full time teaching
- part time enrolled in my PhD
- newly married
- on the ‘Web & Technology’ and ‘Curriculum and Assessment’ Committees of the NSW ETA
Whew! When that’s all written down in a list we can see it was big year! And that’s just the ‘big stuff’.
The ETA bit is important, because it’s through ETA work that I met one of my most influential and constant mentors, Darcy Moore – it was his persistent encouragement that persuaded me to start tweeting and blogging. His advice at the time, which has always stuck with me, was that I shouldn’t be afraid to put my views in the public domain, as long as they are views I am prepared to defend and stand by. In fact, the test of whether you are prepared to say something in public can be an excellent method for testing your convictions.
I’ve used the metaphor before, but real True Blood fans can stand to hear it twice: Darcy you’re the best ‘maker’ ever!
CC-BY-SA image from http://trueblood.wikia.com/wiki/Bill_Compton/Season_2
My other big digi-hat tips go to Bianca Hewes for being such an incredible force of energy and inspiration, and to Mary-Helen Ward who got me writing my first ever blog posts back at university on the internal network. You gals have left footprints all over my professional (and personal) life and I’m so grateful for it.
Milestones IRL – Work
The end of this semester also marks a non-virtual, real life work milestone: four years in one job.
Four. Years. In. One. Job.
It’s not for lack of stamina that I haven’t stayed anywhere else for longer than three years. I worked part time for awhile when I started my PhD. Then I taught for three years in one place before moving interstate and reseting the meter. So it’s not like I’m some kind of education sector Runaway Bride! Although I am also no Baby Boomer, and I confess the idea of staying in one job for a lifetime is simply unfathomable to me. I won’t bother linking to any of the plethora of ridiculous articles about how Gen Y make bad employees – as a Gen X/Gen Y ‘cusper’ I never see myself in those stories (I’m too young to relate to Winona Ryder in Reality Bites, and too old to pull off skinny jeans). But suffice to say that after four years in one job, I’m feeling a sense of stability that I’ve never known before. It’s nice. I’m finally standing still for long enough to start sharpening the saw.
What Next?
Well, it turns out that this is my 299th blog post, so post number 300 is just around the corner 🙂
Other than that, I’m going to keep on keeping on with my online writing and continue to integrate digital communication/curation into my teaching practice. I’m working on a few scholarly journal articles for publication early next year, so my post-PhD academic writing funk looks like it may have finally run it’s course.
I’m trying to take a more active role in promoting our local English Teacher chat on Twitter (#ozengchat).
I’m slowly collecting my poetry teaching materials on the web for other teachers to access with ease.
Aside from that, time will tell.
But for now let me just say: thanks for reading, and happy blogging everyone!
Risk-taking and risk-aversion in teaching
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, online tools, personal, reflections, social media, technology, university on January 30, 2014
Happy 2014 to all! It seems I inadvertently took a blog break over summer holidays – a break from most things digital, in fact. I’m back in the swing of things now though, with a head full of ideas and energy stores replenished. Who knew I was so tired after 2013? Well OK, I did. Now you do too 😉
So, this is my fourth year at my job as a lecturer. How time flies eh? Reflecting on my time so far I can confidently say that I’ve continued the spirit of innovation I had as a high school teacher into my university teaching. I’ve pushed forward with using social networks to support student learning, with developing project-based learning pedagogies, and with developing blended learning experiences including wiki work and blog-based assessment.
But this week when I was offered a chance to trial a new technology with my class, I turned it down.
There are any number of reasons that teachers say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to trying something new. Watching this keynote by Sarah Howard from 2012 today gave me a chance to reflect on my own tendency to be a risk taker in my practice – I usually see the benefits of innovation as outweighing the costs:
…and boy last semester there were some costs. Some cyberbullying from a student really put a damper on my teaching with Twitter, and right at the end of last year I experienced a big delay in giving students assignment feedback after a swathe of electronic assignment files got deleted. Further technology fails ensued as I struggled to negotiate student assignment return via Blackboard, our university LMS. It was a nightmare, and a confidence shaker. In a university teaching context where a whole semester of awesome learning can be overshadowed by a single student complaint to the wrong person, I ended 2013 wondering if all my efforts were ‘worth it’.
Fortunately I value innovation and creativity to such an extent that taking risks in pursuit of better practice is still worth it to me. In her keynote Howard explains that people are less likely to take a risk to pursue something they see no value in, which makes sense really.
I guess the shift for me will not be from being a risk-taker to being ‘risk-averse’ – I haven’t had the stuffing beat out of me quite hard enough yet to be averse to risk! For me the shift will be from high-stakes to more low-stakes risk; rather than pushing the boundaries with a wildly new practice I’ll be consolidating and refining my current pedagogies and taking stock of where I want to go with my teaching in 2015. Which will be nice timing, given the massive course changes we are implementing next year (PS. in six months if I disappear completely, somebody please come find me, I may be perishing under a mountain of new unit outlines…).
Do you see yourself as a risk-taker in your teaching? How risky are you planning to be in 2014?
Explaining theories of learning and pedagogy
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, technology, university on November 18, 2013
I want to post here two excellent images that I have come across to explain the various theories and concepts that can be drawn on in relation to learning and pedagogy.
The first is an image that I found via TeachThought (an excellent website – set aside a good hour to go and browse):
A Diagram Of 21st Century Pedagogy
The image originally came from a 2008 post by Andrew Churches on edorigami, which also features diagrams explaining thinking skills, assessment and ‘fluency’. You can check that post out here: http://edorigami.edublogs.org/2008/08/16/21st-century-pedagogy/
The second image I am sharing here is this maaassssssive map of Learning Theory produced by the HoTEL project in the EU:
Learning theories map by Richard Millwood
While all of the links made in the maps above are open to challenge and discussion, I really value them as texts! Both maps do a great job of visualising some of the theoretical complexity that sits behind education practice and decision making. I’ll definitely be sharing them with my pre-service teachers next year.
Inspiring PBL unit outlines from #CLP409 students!
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, english, university on November 11, 2013
This semester I modified my unit planning assessment for CLP409 (Secondary English Curriculum Studies 2) based on the outline developed by Bianca Hewes. You can see the 40 fantastic project outlines by her fabulous #EDMT5500 students on her blog.
Bianca developed her ‘Inquire, Create, Share’ model for project-based learning (PBL) units after finding that planning PBL units needed to involve more visible teaching and explicit structure to ensure students learned required knowledge and collaboration skills.
As I see it, this approach is a variation of existing models that suggest units of work be designed around phases of ‘Orientate, Enhance, Synthesise’. These particular verbs are popular in Queensland Schools, and can be found as one of two recommended unit planning frameworks on the QSA website.
The two things that I love about the unit framework that Bianca has developed are:
- It provides a structure for PBL units that takes on the narrative flow I find so natural in teaching – there is a clear beginning, middle and end in these units.
- The shift in verbs used to drive learning activity is important; activities to ‘Orientate, Enhance and Synthesise’ could still be very teacher-centered but ‘Inquire, Create, Share’ and similar verbs deliver an imperative to engage student-centered learning and project sharing.
Following Bianca’s lead I am posting my Assignment Task Sheet here for all to see, and below you will find some of my students’ finished products, reproduced with their permission.
Task sheet for CLP409 Assignment 1
Please notice that I used the same Driving Question as Bianca, ‘How can I create a project for English that will help my students own their learning?’, and that I retained some of the structure of her original project as well. Some things I did a bit differently were: adding an essay writing component where students justified their choices using scholarly and professional literature; requiring students to refer to Australian Curriculum elements rather than ISTE NETS and professional standards; providing models of other assignments.
Of course, I could only provide my class with models of assignments because Bianca’s students had been willing to publicly share their work in the first place. So a big THANK YOU to those fabulous (and generous) #EDMT5500 students, and to the University of Sydney, for making their work available to the world 🙂
Sam Mason:
Chloe McIntosh:
Ben Niland-Rowe:
Emma McVittie:
Toni Petersen:
Miranda Clignett:
Sarah Smith:
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