"AP Kids" are not the only ones who need quality learning experiences

After hitting the Google Reader hard while at Subway the other day (probably should've been eating lunch and relaxing instead of working) I was inspired by @InnovativeEdu's post on asking kids to design their own learning. Having just switched to the project-based learning format for my classroom, I love to share what my students are doing at these professional development sessions we conduct.

The question that always comes up is "Yeah, but what level do you teach?"  When my response is AP Statistics, it's immediately dismissed since "they are AP kids."  So what if I said, "I had this great lesson where I stood and lectured for 46 minutes with zero audience participation!"  I can almost guarantee to have the same response, "Well, your lecture worked so well because they're AP kids, no way that would work with my 4.0's!"

As an educator in a professional development workshop, why not spend that time to think of ways to reach the kids that are not "AP kids".  It seems like that would be a better use of time than to confirm your suspicions that there just isn't anything that works to educate those that are not taking Advanced Placement courses.

The students in 4.0 classes are the ones that have been most vocal about being not interested in what you have to say.  They are students that are completely unwilling/unmotivated to work unless it interests them.  Know what is especially uninteresting...x's, y's, and slopes of lines.  But these lower level courses cover basic equation solving and "find the slope" the exact same way, over and over again from the time the student is in 9th grade until 12th grade.

Great lessons, quality education, and interesting projects shouldn't be reserved for the best and brightest students.  The 4.0 students don't need more lectures and more basic junk that they don't care about.  They need to be interested, first and foremost.  They don't need more discipline or a rigid classroom structure.  They've told you 100 times that they hate that environment, so stop imposing it on them.

When I see my "AP kids" work on a project that they're excited about (sampling teachers in the school to see if they have tattoos, experiment on whether or not people can walk and text, see how often radio stations repeat certain songs) they aren't excited about it because they're "AP kids".  They aren't excited about it because I threatened them with detention if they showed a lack of enthusiasm.  They're excited about it because they had the choice in what they wanted to do.  They're students, there is no way they are so drastically different than their peers that just so happened to not do well in one math class so they were forced to slide down the ladder and be stuck in "4.0 world".

Oh, and they learn way more from me doing their own projects than they ever could from answering some multiple choice and some free response questions for me.

Reassessment Fridays (SBG): A Love Story

“Every student did their own thing in class today.”
How often is that the summary of a mathematics class?  How about an art class? 


Today was the standard reassessment day for my AP Stat classes.  I wasn’t sure how I was going to let students reassess when I started Standards Based Grading.  I’ve come up with using every Friday as a reassessment day.



I let students pick 2 skills to reassess on.  They pick them Wednesday, I create reassessments Thursday, they take them on Friday.  The reassessors are given a mail merged document that is their assignment for that day’s reassessment.  Should they choose not to formally reassess in class, they always have the option to do a project on their own to show their mastery of any of the skills they have learned.  This has been a system that works for the students that want to reassess, but it works even better for those not reassessing.


Today about a third of each class was reassessing.  So what do the other students in class do?  They play.  They learn.  They collaborate:

1. One student began conducting simulations to simulate random clicks in Minesweeper.  Two others quickly became interested and a Minesweeper collaborative was born.
2. About 10 different students were editing 10 different pages of the class wiki to make it an online textbook.  
3. They were gathering data for different projects they hope to complete later in the year
1. a project where they wish to determine the proportion of teachers at school that have tattoos
2. simulating hands for various different card games
3. the true proportion of dives by a diver that are “ripped”

I look forward to my “Reassessment Fridays” because of the classroom vibe.  I’ll provide a few ideas for what can be worked on, then they get started doing things that they want to do.  Today’s ideas: Conduct a simulation, finish an old project, start a new project, edit the class wiki, create models of data collected this week.  I’m immediately working on making this the classroom activity for every day, not just Friday.  


My favorite part about it is that I am providing them time to be as smart as they want to be in class.  I’m not tricking them into learning with some gimmick.  I’m not having them finish a worksheet for points.  I’m not asking 26 of them to answer the same question.