In this somewhat new blog feature, I will offer up a question from the statewide examinations that New York City students take each year. The purpose of this will not be for you to try to provide the correct answer, but rather to join me in examining the question. What does it tell us about student understanding? What do each of the wrong answers mean? What is this question testing? What is it really testing? What would students need to know and be able to do to answer this question correctly?

I gave a workshop for data teams on Friday. Three of the groups were examining last year’s 4th grade ELA scores, which I knew meant that we’d be talking about Abigail. In my visits to schools, I’ve found that students who took this exam had a lot of trouble on questions relating to this poem (click to enlarge):

Students had trouble on a number of the questions, but we will just look at one: Item 21 on the 2010 New York State Grade 4 ELA Exam:

The intended performance indicator is “Make predictions, draw conclusions, and make inferences about events and characters,” but we can be the judge of that.

What is this question testing? Does it fit the performance indicator? Which of the wrong answers would you predict students would choose the most often? Why? What would students need to know and be able to do to answer this question correctly?

I thought it might be fun to try something new with the “Question of the Week” feature here on the blog. Instead of asking my readers a question, I will offer up a question from the statewide examinations that New York City students take each year.

The purpose of this will not be for you to try to provide the correct answer, but rather to join me in examining the question. What does it tell us about student understanding? What do each of the wrong answers mean? What is this question testing? What is it really testing? What would students need to know and be able to do to answer this question correctly?

Sound like fun?

To differentiate this feature from the Question of the Week, I’ll call this the Item of the Week, which is what we call questions in the parlance of standardized testing.

Today’s item comes from the 2010 New York State Grade 4 Mathematics Exam. The strand is Measurement and the performance indicator is “4.M04 Select tools and units appropriate to the mass of the object being measured (grams and kilograms).” You can click the image for a larger view.

I like the layering of this question. First of all, the student needs to know which units measure mass and which don’t. If they answer A or D, they don’t. But to choose between B and C, students need to have some idea of how much a gram really is.

Sometimes these questions will have distractor answers that use numbers from the problem to try to trick students into choosing them. But there are no numbers in this problem. And all of the answers use the same number.

The trick here is in the first sentence. The fact that Mr. Patel moved his chair across the room is not relevant. But if you don’t know what “mass” means, that first sentence might trick you into thinking you are looking for a distance, in which case you might choose D. This assumes, of course, that you have no idea how long a kilometer is.

All in all, it seems like a pretty fair question that tests what it purports to test. In practice, it turned out to be one of the harder items for New York City students taking this exam.

As always, I invite further discussion.

I am proud to announce that I have recently published a chapter in this book on teaching literature through technology. You can ignore the description; it seems to have been inadvertently switched with that of this book. Neither page describes my chapter, but you can read the abstract on the publisher’s page, or I could just tell you what it’s about.

Unlike this blog, the book chapter is actually about teaching Shakespeare! No riddles. No anagrams. No politics. (Well, maybe a little bit of politics.)

Here is the basic idea. I begin by citing experts who are skeptical of the ability of elementary school students to do Shakespeare. Specifically, I discuss the Dramatic Age Stages chart created by Richard Courtney.

Courtney describes “The Role Stage” as lasting from ages twelve to eighteen, at which point students are capable of a number of new skills that I would consider essential for understanding Shakespeare in a meaningful way. These skills include the ability to think abstractly, to understand causality, to interpret symbols, to articulate moral decisions, and to understand how a character relates to the rest of the play. So based on this chart, I would have to conclude that a student younger than twelve would not be ready to appreciate Shakespeare in these ways.

But Courtney bases his chart on the framework of developmental phases of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. These phases describe what a lone child can demonstrate under testing conditions. A more accurate and nuanced way of looking at development is provided in the work of Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who described a “Zone of Proximal Development” (ZPD), which is a range between what a child can demonstrate in isolation, and what the same child can do under more social conditions.

So I wondered if fifth-grade students (aged 10) would have some of the skills associated with “The Role Stage” somewhere in their ZPD. If so, a collaborative class project should provide enough scaffolding to develop those skills and allow ten-year-old students to understand and appreciate Shakespeare on that level.

So I developed and implemented a unit to teach Macbeth to a fifth-grade class in the South Bronx, using process-based dramatic activities, a stage production of the play performed for their school, and a web-based study guide to apply what they had learned. The idea was to use collaborative projects to get the kids to work together to make collective sense of the play. I then examined their written work for evidence that they had displayed the skills associated with “The Role Stage” in Courtney’s chart, and I was able to find a great deal of it.

I also create a three-dimensional rubric to assess the students’ work over the course of the unit. I say a three-dimensional rubric because I use the same eight categories in all three rubrics, but they develop over time to reflect the increased sophistication that I expect the students to demonstrate. I then compare the students’ performance-based rubric scores to their reading test scores to demonstrate that standardized testing paints only a very limited picture of what a student can achieve. (I did say that it had a little bit of politics.)

Anyway, that’s what my chapter was about. I just saved you $180! And I’m hoping to return to a regular blogging schedule soon, so more content is hopefully on the way.

Yesterday, I gave a workshop for teachers on using data to improve student achievement. This is something that is going to become an increasing part of my work, so I may be blogging about it from time to time. The idea is to cull information about students from a variety of sources, systematically analyze that information in order to identify areas of improvement, and then create an action plan for targeting those areas.

In some cases, the results of careful data analysis can be surprising. So often we jump to conclusions about why students aren’t achieving, or we depend on underlying assumptions that may be based on our own pre-conceived notions. Consider for a moment this piece of student work:

Laugh if you must, but it’s easy to get the wrong idea from only a cursory examination. Further investigation revealed that the child’s mother works at Home Depot, and is here depicted selling snow shovels. And if you only relied on your initial observations and didn’t investigate further, you could be lead astray.

Hopefully, the systematic use of data will allow us to avoid such snap judgements and take a more scientific approach to improving student achievement.

I had to access an old hard drive to find the final exam that had the five questions I used for the last Conundrum. While I was looking through it, I also found a list of Shakespeare assignments that might be of interest to readers of this blog. Every now and then, not too often mind you, but every now and then, this blog is actually about teaching Shakespeare.

These assignments were for a graduate course on Shakespeare, but one in which I did not assume that the students had any prior experience in Shakespeare. I later adapted these into a list of assignments for a more advanced course on Shakespeare, which is the same class who got the final exam. The earlier class did not have a final exam, but instead were assigned to design a final exam for the course, and provide an answer guide and grading system. That assignment worked out really well. They also were given the assignments below, some of which you may notice are similar to the extra credit assignments I give my English Education students.

Please choose three of the following assignments:

1) Write at least 24 lines of iambic pentameter. This does not need to be in Elizabethan language, nor does it need to rhyme. It can be anything you want, as long as it’s once piece of cohesive writing in iambic pentameter. Each line of iambic pentameter contains ten syllables, with the stress on every second syllable.

2) Choose any text, such as a poem or a song, that has been written in the last twenty years (at least 15 lines). Add footnotes that annotate this text for an audience reading it 400 years from now who might not understand contemporary allusions and idiomatic language. Be sure to choose a text that is conducive to this assignment.

3) Choose any passage from one of the plays we’re studying this semester (at least 30 lines). Rewrite the scene in contemporary language. You may choose a contemporary setting and style as well, but try to stay as faithful to the meaning of each line as possible. The use of iambic pentameter is not required.

4) Choose a scene from one of the plays we’re studying this semester. Approach the scene as a director and describe your concept for the scene in a 5-7 page essay.

5) Choose a character from one of the plays we’re studying this semester. Approach the scene as an actor and trace the character’s development through the play in a 5-7 page essay.

6) Choose one of the plays we’re studying this semester. Approach the scene as a teacher and develop a three-lesson unit plan to teach the play.

7) Watch two movie versions of one of the plays we’re studying this semester. Compare and contrast them with each other and with the original text in a 5-7 page essay.

8) See a live production of one of the one of the plays we’re studying this semester. Write a 3-5 page essay describing the choices made by the production in interpreting the text.

9) With at least one other person, prepare and present a scene from one of the plays we’re reading this semester. (minimum 15 lines each). Memorization is required. In a one-page essay, describe your reasoning for choosing this scene and the approach you intend to take.

Which assignments would you have chosen? What assignments could I have added to the list of choices? How could these assignments be adapted to make them more appropriate for high school students?

Last week’s Conundrum about kings named Henry reminded me of a Shakespeare final I gave about five years ago. This was for an advanced graduate course on Shakespeare, and I actually decided to give the final exam as a takehome. What’s more, the first five questions were True or False. Surprisingly, only two students got all five questions right. Sounds like quite a Conundrum to me…

TRUE or FALSE?

1. Twelfth Night is named after a holiday in December.

2. Gloucester (in King Lear) has two sons; the bastard one is named Edmund.

3. Katherine of Valois was wife to Henry V, mother to Henry VI, and grandmother to Henry VII.

4. Based on evidence in Hamlet, it is reasonable to assume that Shakespeare may have read at least some of the writings of Sigmund Freud.

5. The title of The Merchant of Venice refers to a Jewish merchant named Shylock.

I should point out that the five questions combined were ten percent of an exam that was ten percent of the final grade, so these questions alone were not enough to affect anyone’s final grade. I don’t believe in trying to trick students, but I felt that a takehome exam deserved a little extra bite. The rest of the exam was short answer and essay and was very straightforward.

Can anyone answer all five questions correctly?

I’ve been getting a pretty good response to some Shakespeare writing assignments I posted last week. Those of you looking for more assignments may enjoy the following.

About five years ago, I taught a graduate course on teaching Shakespeare. As part of their course requirements, students had to choose three out of nine assignments to complete during the semester. If more than one assignment involved choosing one of the plays were were studying, they had to choose a different play for each assignment.

Please choose three of the following assignments:

1) Choose a dramatic scene written in the twentieth century. It could be from a play, movie, television show, cartoon, etc. Rewrite the scene as though it were written by Shakespeare. Try to stay as faithful to the original as possible while remaining consistent with Shakespeare’s poetic style and period.

2) Identify ten references to Shakespeare in contemporary American non-theatrical popular culture. Each reference can be a play title, quote, or character, but not simply a word coined by Shakespeare. The references must be made during this semester (periodicals published, movies in the theatre, first-run television shows, political speeches, etc.) Describe the original context of each reference and evaluate its appropriateness.

3) Imagine that you are a screenwriter, and have been asked to write a modern-day movie based on a Shakespeare play. Choose one of the plays we’re studying this semester and select a modern-day setting and characters for the play. Describe the updated story scene-by-scene. What modifications are necessary? What essential elements remain?

4) Imagine instead that the movie studio has chosen to do a Shakespeare play in the original, but with big-name celebrity actors. Choose your ideal cast and edit three key scenes for production. Explain the rationale for your choices.

5) Choose one of the plays we’re studying this semester. Approach the play as a dramaturg and compile a comprehensive research file that might assist a production company in performance.

6) Choose one of the plays we’re studying this semester. Approach the scene as an education specialist and develop a resource guide for teachers who want to teach the play.

7) Choose one of the plays we’re studying this semester. Compare and contrast two published versions of the play (e.g. the Folger and the Arden). Be sure to discuss their treatment of the primary source materials (such as Quartos and Folios). Choose two versions with differences sufficient to make the assignment meaningful.

8) See a live production of one of the one of the plays we’re studying this semester. Write a 3-5 page essay describing the choices made by the production in interpreting the text.

9) With at least one other person, prepare and present a scene from one of the plays we’re reading this semester. (minimum 15 lines each). Memorization is required. In a one-page essay, describe your reasoning for choosing this scene and the approach you intend to take in interpreting it.

Nobody chose Assignment 2 because they thought it would be too difficult, but as the semester wore on, they were kicking themselves because they started to realize how ubiquitous Shakespeare references are. And the course was at NYU, so Assignment 8 was not a problem logistically.

Needless to say, I got some really great stuff back. Giving creative assignments like these makes learning more fun for both the student and the teacher. Plus, it helps discourage plagiarism.

Which assignments would you have chosen? What assignments could I have added to the list of choices? How could these assignments be adapted to make them more appropriate for high school students?

I just gave an assignment that might be of interest to readers of this blog. It’s for a graduate course in English Education, so the students are all either currently English teachers or are studying to be. This is an extra-credit assignment for students who need to make up for missing class, but other years I have assigned it to everyone.

1. Translate a scene from Shakespeare (minimum 36 lines) from Shakespeare’s Early Modern English to our American English of the 21rst century. This should be a line-by-line translation.

2. Take a text that was written in the last ten years (most likely a song) and annotate it for an audience reading it 400 years from now who might not understand our idiomatic language or our cultural references. Please choose a text that is conducive to this activity. Minimum 14 footnotes.

3. Write an original piece in iambic pentameter. It can be anything you want, as long as it’s one cohesive piece that is at least 14 lines of iambic pentameter.

4. Discuss your experience completing these three activities and your assessment of their value as assignments in the English classroom.

Does anyone have anything to add to the list? I’m not looking for more work to give my grad students; I’m just starting a brainstorm of writing assignments that would give high school students a broader view of Shakespeare.

Here’s a good example of a high school English teacher using a blog to post and collect student assignments. This is one sample assignment for students in the middle of reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Your assignment now is to take this mixed-up love mess and bring it to a conclusion with a happy ending. As it stands right now, everything is messed up and needs resolution. Assume the role of a narrator and finish the story. This is your chance to predict how this all turns out in the real play.

The students can now write a response to this and read what others have written as well. It seems like a lot of this is going on at home, but as more and more schools adopt one-to-one computing environments (something I’ve personally been very active in for the past year and a half), the more this sort of thing will become commonplace classroom practice.

This presentation from Karl Fisch has been making the rounds.

Students entering kindergarten this September will graduate from high school in 2020. How will the world be run then? How old will you be in that year? It’s not really that far off, is it?

Discuss.