Fail: How Zeroes Affect Student Performance

You can’t parent every child the same. Almost every book on parenting will tell you that. The same is obviously true for teaching—you can’t teach every student in the same way because every child learns differently.

Yesterday, I read a blog post called, “Here’s what really happens when you give a zero.” Joe Bower, a teacher in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada explained, “The students who are the hardest to educate and the hardest to like, are the ones that already get a steady diet of zeroes, and yet they are the ones who need us the most.”

If educators are striving to differentiate learning, raise the level of understanding, and prepare students for college and career, where does giving zeroes for assignments play into those goals? Regardless of whether a child is the best or worst student in your class, zeroes don’t motivate students to learn or to improve.

Though there may be arguments that giving a student a zero prepares them for the consequences presented in the real world, Mr. Bower says:

“It is very likely that dropouts are the kids we have the most trouble with in the real world, and yet they are the ones who get the most zeroes. If giving zeroes helped prepare dropouts for the real world, why is that they are the ones who have the most trouble living in the real world?”

How do we help the students who already feel like failures? How do we help all of our students?

The Necessity of an Environment Conducive to Learning in the Classroom

Student Achievement Best Practices

By Rebecca Lee Curry, English Teacher

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Student achievement has always been considered the ultimate objective in the classroom, and rightly so.  It would make sense then to seek guidance from teachers who have had great success with their students.  I am a firm believer that no matter how much you “learn” about teaching, there is wisdom that cannot be gained but through experience.  Seeking guidance from the right source is always beneficial and has certainly been the case for me.  When I first began teaching full-time, I was blessed to learn from my dad, who is an amazing teacher.  He has been teaching for 39 years and has helped me more than he will ever know.  He has answered countless (literally, countless!) questions and has given me advice when I desperately needed words of wisdom. 

Casting together the advice I have received that has proven true again and again with my own experience, I believe that as a teacher, you must be able to manage your classroom.  Students are unable to learn in a haphazard environment, thus students will not be able to achieve their full potential.  Knowing this and making classroom management a priority has saved me and my students (though they are unaware of it) several times while going about day-to-day activities in the classroom.  Students simply cannot learn to the best of their ability in a chaotic environment.  I set high expectations for my students from the first day, both behaviorally and academically because classroom management is crucial to giving students a firm-founded learning environment.  If students know what is expected of them, they are then capable of helping create a positive classroom environment. 

Further, promoting motivation through good teacher/student relationships is important to be able to create a positive learning environment.  My expectations never change over the course of the year, but as each day passes, I learn a little more about my students and gain insight into what motivates them.  Motivation is key to student achievement, and we as teachers can easily facilitate motivation in our classrooms.  Classroom management is an integral part of student achievement even being possible, but forming good teacher/student relationships is also essential to motivating your students to be successful in their educational endeavors.

Though I’m sure it sounds cliché, I do always try to be exceptionally encouraging to my students because motivation stems from encouragement.  Before I left one of my student teaching placements, my mentor teachers asked the students I had taught for the past six weeks to write me a letter.  The overwhelming majority of my students thanked me for being patient with them.  I thought they would be appreciative of all the complex lesson plans I had created and stressed over.  I assume it is needless to say that patience was certainly not what I had expected to stand out to them.  Having taught for a few years now, I can see that it is easy to become frustrated in general, as is the case with any job (if we’re all honest).  Even if frustration isn’t directed at students, they are perceptive enough to pick up on this emotion.  I’ll be the first to admit that there are plenty of days when I struggle with keeping a consistently positive attitude and a pleasant sense of patience.  However, I have learned that my encouraging words and attitude put great vibes in my students.  Consequently, great vibes motivate students to seek success.  As Mr. Fred A. Manske wrote in his book Core Strategy for Success, “I’m convinced that there is considerable power in such positive ‘vibes.’  The more you do it, the more sensitive you’ll become to the needs of others.”  The more positive we are with our students, the more we will realize how much of an impact it has on them. 

Learning from other teachers and being willing to seek advice leads to continual self-improvement, and our students, in turn, are the ones who benefit.  Student success is hard to achieve if the students’ environment is not conducive to learning, but if a teacher has great classroom management skills and an encouraging and motivating spirit, student success is much easier to achieve.  Achievement is what every teacher strives for his or her students to experience, and having a heart to teach makes student success possible.

Rebecca Lee Curry teaches ninth-grade English at Columbia Central High School in Columbia, Tennessee.  She currently teaches both honors and standard classes and is certified to teach Advanced Placement Literature and Composition.  Rebecca is a member of the National, Tennessee, and Maury County Education Association(s).

Helping Students Reach Their Potential

A Post on Student Achievement Best Practices

 By Monica Jones, ELA Consultant, Detroit Public Schools

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image courtesy of education-portal.com

“Why are you still here?”I asked him.

Bradford looks up at me with sad eyes, but his smile is magnetic. “I gotta pass this class.  Can I do some extra credit?”

His statement made the hair on my neck stick straight out. “Well I really don’t have any extra credit assignments that you could do. Perhaps if you came to my class every day you could catch up on all of your missed work.”

Bradford smiled again.  “I be tryin’, but I have to babysit.”

His statement gave a whole new ring to an age old problem; trying to meet the student where they are.  We don’t live in a perfect world, so as educators how can we expect perfect students? Student achievement relies on meeting the needs of each student which often times is difficult because the student isn’t there.  And after missing so many classes or days, it becomes impossible for the student to catch up.  This leads to everyone becoming dismayed and puts the student at risk for dropping out of school.  Excessive absenteeism can be the cause of why students are not reaching their full potential.

Now I’m not proposing that educators hold their heads and cast their eyes to the ground.  It can be done; but with patience and diligence. The 21st century student has evolved so that lecturing in front of a class for sixty to ninety minutes does not guarantee that loads of learning is taking place.  Educators must be cognizant of the various backgrounds  that are sitting in front of them and make strong efforts to ensure that lessons are being delivered that addresses  the needs of the students.   Lecturing, hands-on projects, student centered lessons are all pedagogies that can be used that have the potential of reaching each and every student across the academic spectrum.  But, of course, they have to be there in order to learn.

Getting back to Bradford, his problem was not that he needed academic or remedial help; he just needed a remedial attendance program.  I contacted his guardian, who happened to be his aunt, and explained the situation of why he was failing not only my class but two others.  Of course, she feinted shock and claimed to not realize that he was failing, but she was also not aware of our district’s attendance policy.  We met and she and Bradford verbally agreed that they would both make an effort to ensure that Bradford was in school and not at home babysitting.  Simple, right?  In this case it was.  Bradford and his aunt both kept their promises and by the end of the year Bradford went into his junior year with a 3.2 GPA.

The teaching profession, unfortunately, doesn’t always teeter on the norm.  Some days are better than others.   I once had an eighth grader who brought her three year old cousin to school because there was no one to babysit.  Am I a daycare now?  Because the last time I looked at my check I was not receiving daycare pay for each student.   I took a deep breath and gently nudged her and her toddler cousin towards the counseling suite.  “No sweety.  Your little cousin can’t stay with you while you’re in class today.”   Unfortunately, my student had to be sent home that day because why…she had to babysit.

From the ritzy suburban school of choice to the decaying urban school on the corner, there are going to be students who are at risk of failing because they just don’t come to school.  And often times, they want to, but they have other distractions that prevent them from being in a chair everyday that the school door opens.  As conscientious educators, we must carve out some time during our much needed prep and at least attempt to get to the root of why all the chairs are not filled in our classrooms.  It has often been said, that one of the perks of teaching is once the bell rings, you can close your door and do your thing.  But when the bell rings and your door is closed and you are looking at far too many empty seats, that is a sign of a serious gap. Those empty seats represent a person who is entitled to an education and unfortunately, they are not there to receive it.

A Physics Teacher's Formula for Increasing Student Learning

A Post on Student Achievement Best Practices
By Buffy Sexton

A few of my TLN colleagues and I were recently discussing the X PRIZE Foundation and that its next challenge—and prize—will be focused on education. As we brainstormed ideas for challenges and prizes, I couldn’t help but wonder how an external prize can be created when, in reality, our students’ education is the prize. Better yet, growth in their learning is the prize. And even better than that, our students’ ability to increase their own learning is the prize. Now there’s a challenge.

What could that kind of challenge look like? Let me turn up my imagination for a bit. . . .

Okay, physics teacher stepping in here. Let’s say that knowledge gained can only travel in the positive direction (that whole “never forget how to ride a bike” thingy), just like distance traveled. We need a unit of measure, so let’s use grade level, or gl. I will assign knowledge the variable k. Let’s also say that we will use the Greek letter ∆ (delta) to represent the amount of change in k. We can then use this formula for the amount of change in k: ∆k(gl)=kfgl-kigl, where f stands for final and i stands for initial.

Alright, looking good. But we need to know how much time passed for this ∆k. We’ll use ∆t, which just happens to stand for change in time. And, let’s use a school year, or y, as the unit of measure.

Let’s review:

Symbol	Meaning
k	knowledge
∆k	Change in knowledge
gl	The unit of measure for ∆k. (a grade level)
∆t	The time interval used to reach that ∆k. Measured in school years.

We are rollin’ now! So the challenge: at minimum, we want to get students to a ∆k of 1gl/1y. Ah, but we know it has to be student-driven ∆k. So, how do we get them to want to increase their ∆k?

Research has shown (that would just be my nine years of teaching) that while some, if not most, students do want to increase ∆k, not all students seem to care enough to try/stay on task/come to school on a regular basis/____________________. You can fill in the blank with the issue of your choice.

So what are concerned, exhausted, at-their-wits'-end educators to do?

Here are my humble thoughts:

• Embrace the Common Core standards (or, for my state, the Kentucky Core Academic Standards). They let us know what students should know and be able to do at the end of a given grade level. Will the first year of implementation be messy? Yes. Easy? No. There are a million if’s, and’s or but’s out there surrounding the Common Core. Transfer that resistive energy to kinetic energy. For science, the Common Core outlines what good science teachers already do.

• Stop fighting the things that already keep our students on task (albeit tasks they want to do). By this I mean their technology. Smart phones. iPads. Tablets. iPods. Xbox. Wii. We have been so busy trying to make sure students aren’t texting during class that we’re losing the chance to use the same equipment to keep them on task.

• Here’s the scariest one—yes, worse than cell phones in the room! Give, put, place, or throw the responsibility for learning on the student. Yes, I said it. Don’t stand and deliver. Watch and facilitate. Get on the sidelines and coach. Get out of the game and let them play to learn.

Give students appropriate tools, guidelines, and scaffolds. Turn up your imagination for a minute. What could this look like in your classroom? Picture, if you will—Twilight Zone, just go with it—a normal classroom on a normal day like any other. Only the desks aren’t desks. They are round tables. The students aren’t sitting, taking notes from a teacher standing in the front of the room. Some students are taking notes from a real text book. Some are taking notes on iPads. Some are conducting a lab. Some are filming said lab. Some are conducting online simulations of the lab.

Look, there’s a kiddo watching the video of the lesson he missed yesterday. Watch him. Stop. Rewind. Play. Stop. Rewind. Play. Stop. Write. See here? Here’s the teacher. Cruising around the room. Stopping to encourage her. To push him. To question her. To answer his question with a question. Each student has her own learning target. And each student is giving individual evidence of ∆k. How much of an increase in ∆k will students push themselves toward?

This isn’t the Twilight Zone. It’s the new educational landscape: student-driven learning. Will this be messy at first? Probably. Easy? Could be. Let’s see what kind of challenge the students design.

Buffy Sexton teaches science at Meyzeek Middle School in Jefferson County, Kentucky. She is a National Board Certified Teacher and a member of CTQ’s Implementing Common Core Standards team.

4 Kindle Fires with Your Name On Them

April Fool's was yesterday, so you know that this is the real deal--every week during the month of April, we are giving away a FREE Kindle Fire every week for that week's guest bloggers! And since there are only 5 days in a work week, you can do the math on your odds of winning this time.

Just ask Curtis Nightingale how his Kindle Fire is working out--but if he doesn't respond, then he's probably just having too much fun (umm, I mean work) with it.

During the month of April, our Weekly Video Blog and this blog are focusing on "Student Achievement Best Practices: How to Help Your Students Reach Their Potential." If you'd like some ideas of what to write about, visit our Weekly Video Blog. Today's video is from PD 360's program "Questioning to Stimulate Learning and Thinking," and it's called "Processing Student Responses."

At School Improvement Network, our goal and our passion is support teachers and prepare all students for college and career readiness. Let's talk together about effective strategies for understanding students and helping them reach their potential.

Happy blogging!