Incremental Improvement

 

 While I love those "Aha! That's genius!" moments (which I am most certainly always open to), it's constantly focusing on making small, incremental improvements which lead to big growth in the long-term. Those small changes may not seem like much at first, but over the long-term they can be completely transformative. 

To give you an image of incremental change which leads to big results, today I took my dog Archer into the vet for a check-up. His last visit was a few months ago. I had realized that he was getting bigger, but it was hard for me to really tell just how much, since I would see him everyday. In my eyes he's still my little puppy dog. But, lo and behold, he's gone from weighing about 32 pounds in June to 53 pounds today! My little puppy isn't quite so little! (I suppose that's why it's getting more difficult to lift him up. At least I can be pretty sure that it's not because I'm getting weaker...) Now, what you choose to focus on incremental improvement may or may not be a puppy, I think an analogy can be found there. (While tempting, I'm NOT going to refer to my students as puppies. Scout's honor. Of course, by saying that I'm NOT going to refer to my students as puppies I suppose the argument could be made that I am to some extent. It's sort of like saying, "Don't think about a pink elephant." You're going to do it either way. In fact, as teachers we're told to always frame things in the affirmative, because if you tell someone not to do something they're going to focus on what you told them not to do. Sigh... I hope you like tangents...)

One major way for me to keep track of those small improvements is through my use of presentations in my classes. First of all, I use them so that my teaching is image-rich and it helps students (and myself) to have a very clear idea of where we're at in the lesson, particularly since I use little to no English in the classroom. But, it's not just about helping myself and my students to keep organized and aware of expectations.

One of the major factors of using presentations (for me anyway) is that I can easily move activities around and/or modify them on the fly, or at least soon thereafter. While I love the idea of keeping notes on what went well, what didn't go so well, and what I can improve on in the future, it's difficult to have a good system for that. That's where my presentations come in. When students are working independently or in groups I can easily freeze my projector and then go right on over to my computer and change around my presentation as needed. Oftentimes it's during the moment or not long after that I come up with ideas for improvement. Even if it's something that I don't have time for right now I can easily add a slide and quickly type in those ideas to flesh out further on in the future. 

Also, if there are things that didn't go so smoothly, or if I find that there are certain pieces of information that need further review I can fairly quickly make those changes for future classes, if not for the current class. While these changes may be small in the moment, they will cumulatively create more momentum and success in the future. It may not seem dramatic at first, but after years of constant incremental improvement you can make great gains! Just stick with it and focus on the next step!

The Joy of Moodle Quizzes!

One of the most amazing things about Moodle (our online content manager) that I'm really getting into this year is the ability to create quizzes that are (mostly) graded by the computer. Using Moodle I can make quizzes that have all of the multiple choice, true/false, matching, and short answers automatically graded by the program. I then only need to grade essay questions or other questions that require a more complicated response. This is a lifesaver for me because one of the things that I really hate to do is grade the very repetitive and mostly mindless grading that those types of questions require. (Of course, I also believe in using projects, presentations, and other sorts of products for summative assessment. In fact, I find them to be quite fun, interesting, and useful. But, I do believe there is value in more traditional forms of assessment such as quizzes.)

Not only does it make my job more enjoyable, but it gives students instant feedback on how they did on the quiz. They don't have to wait even a day to know. They can find out right away! Now there's feedback for you. Also, I have the option to give them multiple tries to improve their score. Each time they take the quiz the question and answer order is shuffled so it won't look exactly the same as before. This is fantastic because then both they and I can see not only what they need to improve upon, but also exactly what they have improved. I think it's very rewarding to see students say, "Oh, now I get it! That's what that was about!" Plus, I can easily create practice quizzes that they can do as many times as they like so they will know that they are prepared when they do the real thing.

Another fantastic aspect of it is that I can compare how all of my students did on each question without having to flip through a whole bunch of papers. It makes it much easier to see if there are particular questions that a good number of students are (or aren't) understanding, and I can modify my teaching to address that in the future. Moodle does a great job of letting me know how students are doing in essentially real time.

Also, once I get a class set of headsets I will be able to record my voice that students will then be required to respond to. You can even have them record their own voices as the response! It is definitely a time consuming process to get everything going, but I think it well really be helpful for both me and my students in the future.