Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Reinventing Latin Homework: A Gateway to Differentiation?

Today another teacher using Linguachet with her classes asked me how I make assignments with it.  I spent a couple of years experimenting with this myself, and I hope to hear other teachers' ideas very soon! 

I must warn you that seeing all this behavioral data from my own students has begun to change my thinking about how I teach. Formative feedback can be a powerful motivator, but - as we know - there is no single holy grail in education.  To use it most effectively, I've been slowly learning how to watch the process data, then differentiate assignments to keep every student moving forward in flow.  

When the task is reachable for them, I find that students will knock themselves out trying to get to 100% on every question, even if I grade for completion.  When a unit is short and not overly challenging, assigning entire units works well; weaker students will just take a bit longer (and improve more) to reach the same point, but everybody will still get there and that's no problem.  The struggling students often feel encouraged because they saw their struggle pay off.  As a teacher, I feel good because I've emphasized learning as a process, reinforced a growth mindset, etc, etc..
By the same token, however, that learning process is different for every student, as we can now see like never before.  I keep an eye on the average-number-of-tries-per-question column; that shows you how challenging each
More challenging exercises expose significant differences in learning process.
student found the exercise.  When the numbers are green or yellow, they're usually learning from their own mistakes, but over 10 attempts at a question (red numbers) can signal guessing and frustration.  Those students may be spinning their wheels.  I click that yellow part of the row for details to see which questions are troubling them, then click in again to see which words in a question are giving them trouble.  That helps me know how to help them.  

Since the results tab defaults to showing each student's latest unit, you can easily have everyone doing different things without killing yourself, especially during exam review. Sometimes I give ad hominem unit prescriptions ("You need to work on your noun-adjective agreement. Do unit 62.").  More often I have students self-prescribe ("Practice your weakest concept from our last test.").  Sometimes I tell students ("Practice the imperfect.  Do units 29-33, but only pick half the questions in each unit.  Skip the ones you think are too easy.").  This is why Linguachet computes accuracy totally  independently of completion; it allows you to emphasize quality over quantity.  When students see that I am willing to break the curriculum for their learning, they tend to respect the assignment more, and I spend less time policing completion.

The more challenging an exercise is, the more differentiation is needed to help keep everyone in flow.  This is especially true in the review units.  You'll probably find that your strongest students will do challenging sentences at least FOUR TIMES faster than your weakest ones.  For this reason, I now think it's best to assign challenging units (like the reviews) by total time ("Spend 20 quality minutes on this tonight.") rather than percent covered.    Since students can return to a unit again and again, it's difficult to compute total time spent on a unit. However, Linguachet will estimate the amount of time spent on each question (not including first attempt) when the data appear to fall in a credible range.  (If you really must verify something with absolute certainty, you can click three layers deep in the data, turn on the datetime column, and see the timestamp (GMT) for every single student response.  I believe the teacher features video on the site shows you how to do things like this.)

A really cool in-class differentiation strategy here is to train your strongest students (who finish sooner) to coach others by circulating the room and asking process questions ("What's the subject?  It that a 'she' or a 'they'?  Does that change the ending of your verb?") just as you might do.  My mantra to student coaches is, "Don't give them the fish; teach them to fish." This helps your struggling students get scaffolding that keeps them in flow while engaging the stronger ones in rehearsing these same skills in a more advanced way.

As the data expose just how differently our students learn, we'll ultimately want to create review units differentiated by difficulty; one student can handle all the grammar concepts packed into five sentences, while another needs them spread out over twenty so he stays "hooked" and can keep moving forward without shutting down. This is one of the many reasons I'm finishing a custom-content app for teachers.

I hope this helps!  Thanks for asking great questions, and please share whatever you learn!

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