That is why I teach!

"Mr Wood, I just realised I really like to read," said one of my students this morning. The piles of paper and assessments to analyse didn't go away, but faded in importance for the rest of the day. These are the rewards of teaching, those moments of revelation, seeing the joy of learning shining from our students eyes.

Photo by HappyHorizons

Restorative Conversations

Restorative Justice for K12 was my first exposure to this different approach to behavior management a year ago. Over the last two days I have attended a workshop on Restorative Practices run by Greg and Richard of restorativeschools.org.nz who delivered practical and informative workshop on Restorative Conversations. Aside from great food, Greg and Richard kept us focussed by scaffolding and modelling good practices. I often wonder why we teachers so often revert back to direct intsruction when delivering proffessional development to our colleagues.

I like the fact they they call it Restorative Conversations, Restorative Justice still has that old punative judgement ring to it. I now see that it is more about listening and calm conversations. It is about realising the effects of behaviour on those around you, taking ownership and making it right.

We begun by exploring our own and school values because like any path of growth you need to know where you stand now. This led us to explore punative (What rule has been broken? Who do we punish?) verses restorative responses (Who has been affected and how? What needs to happen to put things right?). We then went on to examining the types of restorative practices. For each type we did role play, and even though I was just in a role I could feel the power of the scripted questions which cut to the heart of problems, revealed feelings and required reflection to respond. Powerful stuff!

The Pyramid of Restorative Practices has at its base the Restorative Conversations that would be quick daily classroom chats. The next step, Mini Conferences, are for issues that require a facilitator (usually the classroom teacher) to solve the conflict. Next up is the Classroom Conference for bigger whole class issues, and lastly for the most serious problems, the Full Community Conference. Although at different levels, they all hold they same basic ideals and format.

The restorative process involves three key parts, adptly named the Three Keystones. The most important is the first, Preparation. Next is Participation which should run to a plan concieved in the preparation stage. Lastly and often the most forgotten, but a vital part, is the Follow-up (Have the consequences and support agreed upon been done? Have the relationships been repaired? Can both the victim and offender move forward with dignity?).

The basic restorative conversation is based on these four questions (from the handbook):

1. What happened? (tell the story)
2. Who do you think has been affected? (explore the harm)
3. What do you need to put things right? (repair the damage)
4. How can we make sure this doesn't happen again? (move forward)

If just a few students leave our schools knowing that they can resolve a serious conflict with their dignity intact, then we will have taught something far more valuable than any National Standard can measure. Some things I have taken to heart and plan to follow through on are, reconnecting with my students after they 'finish' any consequence steps by having restorative conversations, and starting a habit of having restorative conversations in our school.

Where does your school deal with behaviour issues?

Photo by Brymo

Testing WordItOut Word Clouds

WordItOut has been doing the buzz around the twitter network today, so I thought I'd try it out. What caught my attention was that you can embed or link your word cloud to your blog. This was something that I found lacking in Wordle (Wordle site at this date was down due to trademark claims).
A Learning Odyssey - Word clouds - WordItOut

Word cloud made with WordItOut

Although WordItOut has fewer features than Wordle, it's control panel is simple. I liked that you can vary the word size by count, no variation, and randomly. It could do with a few more cloud shaping features, but produces a great effect. You do need to save with an email to store the word cloud, however no password is needed so I will use our class email.

I have blogged about other word cloud programs before such as Tagul which is a more complex word cloud site. So there you go, give it a try on your own blog or even better with your students.

If you need ideas on how to use word clouds in the classroom then you must check out Mark Warner "43 Interesting Ways to use Wordle in the classroom" below.

Parent / Teacher Meet

Yesterday evening was our Meet the Teacher evening. Last year's experience of 4 parents showing up, led me to expect a low turnout. Getting parents involved is difficult at our school, and initially it seemed that this would be repeated.

I decided to give the parents a sample of our class life by putting a laptop on each desk. Parents of four students came in and took seats. I had my own list of talking points on the whiteboard which were: Rights and Responsibilities, Expectations, Digital Learning, Homework and Reading, Assessments.

I then took them through a brief explanation of our class wiki and blog. Here comes my sneaky parent / child blog engagement trick! After a fast hard sell of the magnificence of blogging and learning, I asked the parents and whanau to use the classroom laptops to leave comments on their child's group post. Naturally their children took charge and drove the process, bonus.Actually I didn't plan that trick of engaging the the parents, it just happened. In the past I have tried chocolate fish bribery!

As I moved around the classroom chatting to parents, I noticed that another three families had arrived, and a few more would turn up later. All the parents were really interested in their child's behaviour and learning. They were friendly and eager to participate in the future. I wonder if the fun, high energy whole brain teaching and the co-operative learning programme that I have implemented this year has contributed? Most parents said their children love coming to school and seem more focused this year. Perhaps it is that the school whanau have gotten to know me over the past year, the passing smiles and greetings now paying their dues?

A successful evening making connections with parents and whanau.

Photo by oooh.oooh

How to analyse text and websites for reading age

I have been looking for a method to analyse digital text for reading age, this could be online stories, news sites, topic reference websites, or you could just type in a piece of text from a paper based story.

What I found was Lexile Analyzer from

A Lexile Text Measure is based on the two predictors (word frequency and sentence length) of how difficult a text is to comprehend. 

To prepare your text for measurement you need to follow the instruction here. Basically for a website you need to strip out the text from banners, headers and other unrelated text that could alter the results. For paper text you can just type in the story or just cut and paste for digital stories or text.  If a text is too long, you can also just type in a portion of the story. This does change results as you will see below, in this case making it less accurate. I am looking at this from a guided reading perspective, so possibly if the Lexile measure is viewed as an independent reading level, you may get different result. As usual teacher judgment is called for.

In order to test this, I chose a New Zealand Journal Surf article, "Worms for Dinner?" (Part 01, Number 5, 2008, pages 7-10) with a Guided Reading Level of 9.5-10.5 years. The New Zealand Primary Schools Reading Age Guide shows this age as a Level 28. In Year 5 (New Zealand) students are around 9 years of age.

For the first test I typed in the whole story of 246 words, then I tested a smaller portion of 141 words.

Test Results 1

Word Count 246

Lexile measure 760L (Grade 5; age 9 - Lexile Text Measures by Grade)

Mean Sentence Length 11.18

Mean Log Word Frequency 3.52

Test Results 2

Word Count 141

Lexile measure 680L (Grade 4; age 8 - Lexile Text Measures by Grade)

Mean Sentence Length 10.07

Mean Log Word Frequency 3.53

This convinced me that it is an accurate enough tool for me to use to gauge texts when I have no idea of the reading level. Below are the Lexile Measures as well as the NZ Reading Age Guide to compare.

Lexile Text Measures by Grade

Grade	Approx Age	Text Measures (from the Lexile Map) 25th - 75th percentile
1	5	200L to 400L
2	6	300L to 500L
3	7	500L to 700L
4	8	650L to 850L
5	9	750L to 950L
6	10	850L to 1050L
7	11	950L to 1075L
8	12	1000L to 1100L
9		1050L to 1150L
10		1100L to 1200L
11 and 12		1100L to 1300L

New Zealand Primary Schools Reading Age Guide

Reading  age	Level	Colour
12 - 14 years	31
11 - 12 years	30
10 - 11 years	29
9.6  - 10 years	28
9.0  - 9.6  years	27
8.6  - 9.0  years	26
	25
8.0  - 8.6  years	24
	23
7.6  – 8.0  years	22	Gold
	21	Gold
7.0  – 7.6  years	20	Purple
	19	Purple
6.6  – 7.0  years	18	Turquoise
	17	Turquoise
6.0  – 6.6  years	16	Orange
	15	Orange
5.6  – 6.0  years	14	Green 3
	13	Green 2
	12	Green 1
	11	Blue 3
	10	Blue 2
	9	Blue 1
5.0  – 5.6  years	8	Yellow 3
	7	Yellow 2
	6	Yellow 1
	5	Red 3
	4	Red 2
	3	Red 1
Pre reading	2	Magenta
	1	Magenta

Lixile also lets you search for books by Lexile measure, age range or by difficulty. You can also look up specific books for example "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" by J.K. Rowling, has a Lexile of 950L, and a reading age of 9 - 12.

Can you see a use for this in your literacy teaching this year?

Pay Attention Teachers!

I saw this video on a blog "Free Technology for Teachers" (if don't already, I suggest you follow this blog) and it immediately struck a harmonious cord in me. I also love coming across videos like this one, that express my ideas of how we should be teaching, it reminds me that I am not alone; but we are still few!

Encouraging Student Backchat

As I spend time refreshing my class wiki for 2010, I considered how I could build in a live private chat gadget that would allow students another way to communicate with me. It needed to be embedded in our wiki, be private but easily accessible for the students, and myself when receiving the messages.

Our class wiki is the centre of our learning, as our homepage I wanted an embedded instant message chat function that was private yet simple. Here are the two free chat options I could find that fitted my requirements. I have not tested these under fire yet but time will tell.

Google Talk Chatback is my personal choice but that is because I am a avid user of Google products. You need to sign up to Google Chat, an instant message service, that is where you will receive your messages. Mine pop-up automatically on my iGoogle homepage which is ALWAYS open, but there are other options. When the person is viewing your wiki or blog page, they will see a small but smart chat badge that tell your "online status." When the visitor clicks on it a pop-up chat window appears for them to send you a message. What I really like about this system is that your visitors (my students) can only chat to you (or me). It is private, and another way to communicate with me within our main wikispaces learning environment.

I also considered it's possibility as a student team polling system, and I'm sure other creative educators have come up with interesting classroom uses for it.

Another option is Meebo Me which gives you a chat window embedded into your wiki or blog page. With a click you can also get the window to pop-up. You do however need to sign into Meebo each day. They also have a handy toolbar gadget that allows you to connect with a click and get live messages while working in other windows. Unfortunately the toolbar download is only available for PC.  Meebo also shows your status, but has a nice feature where visitors can send you messages even when you are offline.

Photo of boy next to speaker:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks/ / CC BY 2.0