An Evening with Spence Rogers

I had the pleasure last week to attend a workshop with notable author and educator Spence Rogers on his unique and somewhat unorthodox approach to creating assessments. Rogers has been teaching for longer than I have been alive and the three hour workshop hardly scratched the surface of his expertise. To attempt to summarize the depth of his work here would certainly result in gross generalities and inaccuracies, but I thought I’d share a few of the highlights from the experience.

Hold Students Accountable for Each Other 

How many minutes each day do teachers spend waiting for students to come into class and take out the necessary materials? In my class, the bell rings, I give the all-call for what they need, and then wait and repeat the request to the molasses kids. They are masters of avoidance and realize a sheet of paper and a pencil can easily eat up a minute or two. Cumulatively, that’s more than a week’s worth of instruction spent waiting for students to get ready for class! Rogers suggests remedying this problem by changing the way requests are made. Rather than ask, “Please take out a piece of paper and a pencil,” instead phrase it, “Please make sure everyone around you has a piece of paper and a pencil.” This small shift makes students accountable for each other and uses positive peer pressure to get the job done.

Test the Hard Stuff 

Much of the workshop was spent discussing assessments and how to make them more meaningful. Rogers suggests a method that could loosely be described as a spiraled curriculum (although for a complete explanation, I would suggest picking up a copy of his book, Teaching for Excellence, that integrates assessments throughout rather as a milestone as the end of a unit. By continuing review and reinforcement (Rogers emphasizes that a student needs 28 interactions for real learning to take place), the easier concrete questions can be eliminated from assessments. Students will perform higher on assessments that are more difficult.

Total Response Questioning 

Total Response Questioning was a simple strategy that guarantees that all students in the class can answer a question correctly. The teacher asks the entire class to answer a question in a complete sentence and to continue repeating the answer until told to stop. From the front of the room, the teacher can monitor that all students are engaged, and it also forces every kid to answer the question (while also accumulating those 28 interactions). The result is the room erupting into a cacophony of voices. It’s a bit hokey, but it works.

 Assessment vs. Evaluation 

According to Rogers, assessments discover what students know and how lessons can be adjusted as necessary. Evaluations are used to document what students know. Interesting – In a world of high stakes student assessments and a new teacher evaluation system, it seems some high-ups in New York State could benefit from an evening with Spence Rogers.

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Digital Cheating

When I was in 7th grade, I watched a girl in French class get caught cheating. She had answers written all over the palms of her hands When she finished, she thoughtlessly raised her hand and accidentally showed her cheat sheet to the entire class - and the teacher.

This was in 1993.

Today, ask Google how to cheat on a test and you'll get close to 600,000 possible answers, more than 5,000 of them in the form of video tutorials on sites like Metacafe and Youtube. They range from simple solutions like writing definitions on a stretched rubberband, to intricate redesigns of Coca-Cola labels.

This is the other side of the digital coin.

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Why it is Important to Fail Students

This post is in response to the FOXNews.com article, Are 'No-fail' grading systems helping or hurting students?

When I was about 4 years old, I was babysat by a family friend who lived in an area that would fittingly be described as the boonies. They owned animals - not for the companionship but for consumption, and they were too far from civilization for garbage trucks to trek, so they burned their trash in a barrel behind the house. No heating or cooling systems either – in the summer, the windows were opened, and in the winter, warmth blasted from the colossus cast iron stove that filled much of the living room.

That stove intrigued me. And despite the constant warning, I had to learn for myself that it was not to be touched by little hands. I wasn't burned badly enough to require grafting, or even more than a wet washcloth, but you better believe that I learned my lesson and never touched that stove again.

Why did I touch the stove despite repeated warnings not to? Because you don't learn what hot is without experiencing it. It's an idea too abstract for a young mind to grasp without direct experience.

The same can be said about the ideas of success and failure. As teachers, how are we to convey financial security, homeownership, and all the other attributes of success to students whose only priority is getting home to play Call of Duty? To keep with the hot stove analogy – Students need to feel the heat now, so they don't get burned later in life.

This is why it scares me that schools are doing away with failure policies. Who cares if it hurts the kids' self esteem. So will foreclosure, and unemployment, and poverty, and welfare, and... well, you get the idea. By doing away with the dreaded 'F' we are not allowing our kids to be successful. We are simply making the searing pain of failure much worse later in life.

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