I recently wrote about how we make kids stupid by focusing more on content rather than the thinking skills students will actually need to learn to be successful.  

At no time is this more evident in a high school than during final exam time.  I had to refrain from posting during the actual final exams themselves, lest my outrage at what we traditionally do on final exams result in a post with lots of swearing and reckless emotional statements.  But, now that final exams are over, I feel I must speak out about what these final exams really measure.

In our school, teachers that teach the same course (for example, Biology) must all give the same final exam as a common assessment.  The content of this exam is, in theory, supposed to be agreed upon by all teachers, and be a representation of what we want students to walk away with--what we want students to remember long after they sat in uncomfortable chairs at wobbly desks in our classrooms. 

On the Biology exam, there were many questions pulled from publisher test banks, such as the ones below:

Osmosis is a type of
A.active transport.
B.passive transport.
C.dynamic equilibrium
D.endocytosis

A cell will swell when it is placed in a(n) 
A.hypotonic solution
B.hypertonic solution.
C.isotonic solution
D.None of the above

The questions above do nothing but promote basic recall of information rather than true understanding.   They measure what matters least, what I consider to be facts in isolation--science stuff they will forget as soon as the test is over.   All of these questions can be successfully answered by students who still know absolutely nothing of real importance or value.  So what if a student knows that osmosis is a type of passive transport?  That doesn't mean they understand why it is passive transport, or what passive transport is, or why passive transport is an important process in their cells that aids in keeping them alive on a day-to-day basis, or how passive transport is connected to active transport in key body functions such as the transmission of nerve impulses.  So what if they know that a cell will swell if it's placed in a hypotonic solution?  That doesn't mean they understand how or why a cell maintains its osmotic balance, and why if they drink a lot of water their animal cells without cell walls don't all burst and die.  

As I electronicized this exam into Juno for the exam day, that "So what?" question came to mind a lot as I prepared each question for importing.  The other question that came to mind often about what these questions were measuring was,  "Who cares?"

This is what I have found about most test bank questions--they don't assess any real or meaningful learning at all.  They only test fleeting facts that students have crammed in their heads for that testing period.  This means the final exam that we gave for Biology is, for the most part, completely useless as far as drawing inferences and conclusions about student learning.
 
We did have questions like this on the exam:

You do an experiment that involves yeast, a microscopic unicellular eukaryotic fungus. In this experiment, you put two samples of yeast in two different test tubes. You place one of the tubes in boiling water and boil the sample for 30 seconds. After this, you place 10 drops of a red dye called Congo Red on each test tube. You take a sample from each tube and look at each sample separately under a microscope. You notice that the yeast in the live sample (the one you did not boil) all took up the red dye and are now a lovely red color; however, the yeast in the same you boiled did not take up the dye, and the yeast are colorless, with the dye still in the solution around them.
Which of the following is the best scientific expanation for your results? 

A.The live yeast were making ATP for the active transport of the dye across the membrane.
B.The yeast that were boiled were all dead so the dye didn’t get into the yeast.
C.The yeast that were boiled didn’t have enough proteins in their cell membrsanes to transport the die because they had a lower surface area-to-volume ratio than the live yeast.
D.The live yeast used diffusion to take up the dye, and, since the boiled yeast died, they couldn’t diffuse the dye across.

But there were only 18 of these types of questions on the final exam.  Eighteen questions out of 115 that measured more than just surface-level learning. Not that these questions are perfect measures of true understanding, but at least they went beyond simple recall.  

I did absolutely no review for this exam.  I'm not telling you this as some sort of demented teacher badge of honor; I'm telling you this because I don't see the point of wasting class time reviewing for an exam that I knew wasn't a valid assessment of learning in the first place.  I'm not really interested in how students do on what I consider to be a 90-minute guess-and-forget-fest at the end of each semester.  Their portfolios were what mattered to me--places where students created, collected, and reflected on evidence of their understanding, which, to me, are better measures of what students were going to walk away with.  Not perfect measures, but better.  Their portfolios were what I used to determine their final scores, and that's what my students were busy doing when everyone else was reviewing.

I also did no review because I wanted to see how much science stuff my students could remember on their own.  If I had set up the learning conditions correctly throughout the semester (i.e., the students did the work of learning), shouldn't they be able to be successful on this exam without review?  What's the need for review, other than cramming content into kids' heads just long enough so they can remember it on guess-fest day?  To me, reviewing is a bit like stacking the deck--how do you know what is really stuck in students' long-term memory?  How can you draw valid inferences about real student learning after a few days spent putting random facts into short-term memory?

My students did just fine on the exam.  While there was one area they did poorly on (Photosynthesis & Cell Respiration), this was because of different interpretations by different teachers of what the objectives looked like after students had mastered them.  Our communication of what those look like will need to be improved for next year.  Overall, however, my students did pretty well--and not once did I lecture at them, make them take notes, have them do textbook worksheets, or write out definitions to vocabulary words.  But I don't place much stock in those exam results--because the test, to me, was invalid in its design in the first place.  

Just because you have common assessments doesn't mean the data gathered from them means anything at all.  If the construction of the assessment is flawed, the data obtained from the assessment will be flawed as well.

While poorly-constructed exams frustrate me, what really gets me all snarky about these poorly-constructed exams is what they do to students.  They just reinforce the idea to kids that rote memorization and recall is what learning is about, that how much remembered is important, that content is king.  And that's why I think final exams--or any exam written so students can do well without actually showing any real learning--are making kids stupid.  They teach students to not think.

Looking back on this post, I can see the edges of my outrage peeking through--I apologize for that.  But I can't apologize for how I feel about final exams or any other exam that was designed to make a teacher's job easier rather than focus on what's best for students.  There are better ways to assess what really matters, authentic ways to measure student thinking and learning that matters--and we need to get out of our comfort zones and use those better assessments.  However, in order for these "assessments that matter" to become commonplace, I think what is valued as "learning" by educators needs to undergo some change first.

In Biology we dissect sharks.  We do this not so students can have a two week free-for-all with a dead fish of their very own; students dissect sharks and examine their anatomy in an evolutionary context, explaining how natural selection and other evolutionary forces shape what organisms look like.  It's a smelly time, with lots of squeals of delight and disgust, much clanking of dissecting tools on the large baking pans I bought off eBay for them to dissect upon, and a lot of really bad jokes told by yours truly ("Why is your shark frowning?  Because it's dead."  "Alright, people, this is going to go like shop class--take it apart and put it back together--and make it run.").

 In the past when I have prepared for this unit, I have micromanaged every bit of their time, planned every structure they will have to identify on their small stinky sharks, provided all of the necessary diagrams and pictures, and designed every last progress check and dissection quiz to the last detail.

This year I didn't do any of that.  Mainly because I was short on time, but also because I wanted them to actually enjoy the experience instead of having all the fun sucked out of it with my type-A compulsive overplanning.  

Instead, I told them to read the articles in the first section of this diigo list, highlighting and sticky-noting the web pages, summarizing the process of natural selection.  Then, I gave each team a shark, gave them a list of structures to identify from the major body systems, and then told them this:

"Explain why your shark looks like it does on the inside and outside in terms of natural selection.  Put this explanation in a blog post on your portfolio."

On the first day of dissection, I handed out the sharks, my students gave their sharks names (Dirk and Francois were my faves this year), and lastly I showed them how to make the needed incisions in order for them to reveal the shark parts they would need to identify.

And then I stepped back and got out of the way of their learning for a few days.

I watched them make hesitant cuts and inspections of their shark's innards as if they were expecting the shark to  back to suddenly rise from the dead and slap them with a pectoral fin or two; I watched them compare each other's sharks that were the same yet different; I watched them pull out entire fish from shark stomachs to the delight of some and to the "OMG I think I might see my lunch again" of others.

But I also listened.  I listened to them asking each other questions.

"Why do I have an entire fish in the stomach, but she has just beige goo?"
"What's up with this spiral thing in the intestine?"
"Why is its digestive system so short?"
"THAT's it's kidney?  Why doesn't it look like a kidney?"
"Wait a minute--there's no bladder.  Why doesn't it have a bladder?"

At each question, I heard the tippity-tap of (hopefully) clean hands on netbooks, trying to find the answers.  If that didn't work, they turned to me--who annoyingly just asked them more questions.  ("Why do you think you have a bladder?  What goes in a bladder?  Where does what goes in a bladder go eventually?  So why wouldn't a shark need a bladder?"  This series of questions eventually resulted in the gross realization that, yes, sharks just pee right in the water.  I'll spare you the conversation that was had after they found out baby sharks, poop, and pee all emerge from the same shark opening.)

In previous years I never heard any of those questions, because I was too busy drowning them out with my planning of all the stuff they were supposed to learn.  The questions I heard this week were the sound of learning--learning coming from the learners, not planned and canned by me. 

 I let them take their learning in any direction they wanted, as long as they pulled it back together under the umbrella of natural selection.  But their questions really made me see that I didn't have to be afraid to let them have control--that learning can and will happen without me right by its side, frantically clutching a lesson plan and making sure the learning I want is happening at a predetermined time.

Sometimes we have to let students lead the learning.  And real learning often starts with questions generated by the smaller people who have to do it.

 I'm now toying with the idea that I should start next school year with this smelly old unit, making evolution an underlying theme throughout the year--and letting students practice having control over where they take their learning.  It still needs some refining (I would like it to take on more of a comparative anatomy flavor), but I think it this is one of my crazy ideas that just might work.

I also think this experience really emphasizes the need for teachers to plan for learning to happen, and not always plan (or overplan, in my case) the learning itself.

''We don't have to make human beings smart. They are born smart. All we have to do is stop doing things that make them stupid.'' 
                                                                                                                     --John Holt 

My students are currently working on their ePortfolios for the second semester.  They are creating evidence to show they know and own their knowledge, fixing what they don't know based on their progress checks, and extending themselves to show me they can use that knowledge in new and different ways.

Or, at least, most of them are.

There are still some students that think I want them to put as much memorized (or copied) science stuff on their portfolios as possible, listing out answers to I can statements and repeating digital definitions gathered from Google with the rationale of "more is better" as far as learning goes.

Where do they get this idea that more is better? I think it's because that's what they've been taught school is all about.  Unfortunately, I also think some teachers perpetuate this idea.  Not intentionally; it's the purpose of education that was emphasized to those teachers when they were in school.  We can't forget that almost all of us teachers were subject to the factory model system that seems to value content acquisition (and compliance) above all else.  This system says that being "smart" means being able to repeat the most stuff.  And I've seen teachers who think that students repeating stuff is the ultimate purpose of school, hoping students walk away with lots of information crammed into their heads, with a side-order of "you must get the right answer because school is about getting right answers and if you don't you're a failure because you were wrong" to go with that.  

That's not what I want my students to walk out of my room, or even the building, with.  Why?  Because most of them will barely remember any of my science stuff if they don't go into a field where they can apply all that content that's been forced into their heads.  It will be dumped to make room for new, useful, more relevant information, in favor of new neural pathways that will be used more often.

I don't delude myself anymore into thinking that most of my content is of any importance to them at this stage in their learning.    It may be important to me, but it's not that important to them.  Sure, some of my content may pique their interest; however, if I don't take the time to allow them to explore those interests and have them make meaning of it all and instead blaze a 9-month trail of state-mandated content, then that interest will fade quickly.  And so will their memory of it.  

Because I saw some students falling into the "more is better" trap with their portfolios, I stopped the class and told them a little story about a former student of mine, who now happens to be one of the technology coordinators in our district.  I had the privilege of having this young man in my Biology class about 9 years ago.  I told them all to go ask him how much he remembered from my class--and I told them he would probably say, "Not much."  (I know this because I asked him.)

The class was a little shocked at this.  But I told them this answer wasn't surprising--because he didn't use any of the information I had taught him on a daily basis.  If you don't make sense of and use content over a period of time, you lose it.  And that's exactly what I pointed out to them--that I would rather have a few pieces of evidence that demonstrated real learning, thinking, and meaning-making rather than a lot of science stuff they wouldn't ever remember.

I said the last thing I wanted to see was a bunch of science stuff that I knew wasn't really theirs.   What I wanted to see was that they knew how to think, which is a skill that they would need more than any bit of science minutiae they might retain.

I got a lot of thoughtful looks, some relieved faces, and the sound of many a "delete" key being pressed repeatedly.  I'm sure I'll still get lists of science stuff.  But maybe now not as many.

All students can learn and think on their own, yet for the time we have them in school, we teach these abilities right out of them--or suppress them altogether.  We need to teach students the skills that are truly important for them to remember.  This is one way we can stop making kids stupid--by remembering that we teach kids, not content. 

Let's focus on what they'll really need to know.

While I respect and admire all of my students, my 5th period group of younger humans is only what I can describe as "pleasantly weird."

They are intensely creative.  They are all smart in very different ways, most of them not fitting in the straight-jacketed traditional notion of smartness.   Their brains run in directions that I, at times, fear to go.  But I usually go with them, and always end up pleasantly surprised by their pleasant weirdness which makes them so differently smart.

They were exactly what I needed on a day like today, with the morning that I had.  Let's just say it sucks when you come to the full realization of just how different your teaching philosophy is from the norm, and how others think what you're doing is wrong.  Let's also say that I was seriously considering what else I could do with a teaching degree besides teach.

And then my 5th hour arrived.

We took a final progress check (assessment) today over our genetics unit.  I asked them if they had any questions before we got started.  One young man asked, 

"Mrs. E, I have a very important question.  On a scale from one to dragon, how would you rate this progress check?"

After thinking about that for a second, I told him I would rate it at a "Loch Ness Monster."  The class felt this was a good thing, and happily started separating their desks, moving away from each other as we always do on progress check days.  One student sat himself in front of one of my cabinets, which contains my model of the Earth/Sun/Moon system from my Earth Science teaching days.  This is what he saw:

"Mrs. E," he said, "I need sunglasses.  I won't be able to focus with the sun in my eyes the whole time."

Really bad joke, I know, but I fell apart laughing at this.  It was exactly what I needed--a good, cleansing laugh that brought tears to my eyes.  (Because I do love a really bad joke.  It's a science teacher thing, I guess.)

But it also reminded me of why I love this job.  Because of the relationships I develop with students.  And I shouldn't let anyone or anything get in the way of that.

I've talked before about how I really don't think lecture is an effective learning strategy.   In my experience, even if I build in small activities during a lecture (concept mapping, clicker questions, or any other small activity), the quality of learning that goes on during that type of lecture isn't as high as when I have students do an activity on their own; one where they have to read for information, make mistakes and fix them, discover and make connections, and then synthesize that information into one big honkin' piece of evidence of understanding.

I feel that lecture, for the most part,  is an efficient means of having students put your words on paper to be repeated back to you later.  In other words, lecture works great for imposing your understanding of material onto students.  As far as achieving real learning goes, it just doesn't work for me anymore.

Because I don't lecture, I am always searching for tools that will help students make their own meaning--because that's the only way for students to own the knowledge and take it with them forever and ever.  One tool I have discovered recently is MentorMob.  With this tool (you need to create a free account to use it), you can create what they call "learning playlists" that have students walk through resources about a topic and then check their understanding of the topic.  You can check out two examples of ones I made for my students below:

I have to say I am very impressed with this easy-to-use tool, for many reasons:

• You can insert a variety of media into a playlist.  You can insert links to web pages, PDF files, videos, or anything else you can grab a link for--and this includes a Google Doc.  It won't display the Google Doc, but it will allow you to click a button so it will take the viewer to the Google Doc.  You can also upload files (Word, Excel, and PDF files only) as well, which allowed me to insert some practice into some of my playlists.  When you insert any of the various media types for one step in the playlist, you can type in a description.  This is where I put the directions for students on what to do, what to do after or during viewing the step, etc.  That way, students know exactly what they're supposed to do with each type of media you select to put in your playlist.
  
• You can create small quizzes for viewers of your learning playlist.  This is a great feature for formative assessment, so students can quickly see if they understand the material or not.  I like that you can  instert these quizzes anywhere in the playlist, so you can have students check for understanding frequently.  The creation screen is easy to navigate, and will allow you to create true/false or multiple choice questions.  I found that, while I like to include these in my playlists, to get a better sense of student understanding and have that evidence recorded, I still like my students to take progress checks (quizzes) in Juno, an online assessment tool.
  
• Learning playlists can be created and edited collaboratively.  While you can choose to make your playlist publicly viewed by all or just by those to whom you send the link, you also have the option of selecting who can edit your playlist.  You can allow anyone on MentorMob to edit it, or you can choose to just have yourself as an editor.  I am assuming that, if you leave it private for viewing but open to editing that you can send the link to colleagues that teach the same course, allowing for teachers to collaboratively create and edit a learning playlist for a class.  
  
• MentorMob learning playlists provide a simple and easy method to flip your classroom.  I always want to sit down and make Voicethreads and videos for my students, but can never seem to carve out the time needed for doing that.   However, when creating these playlists, all I needed was the resources I already collected in my diigo lists and on Pinterest.  They still take time, but much less time than creating and editing a video or a Voicethread.  
  
• Students can easily create their own learning playlists to demonstrate understanding.  After they signed up for a free account, students could create their own learning playlists, either for themselves or for others.  An idea that's been banging around in my head (and one I desperately want to remember to use for next year) is giving my students editing rights to one of my pages on the class Google site for each unit.  Then, students can create their own learning playlists for topics, embedding those playlists on the site for everyone to use.  If you have students create ePortfolios like I do, these would be an excellent way for students to demonstrate understanding of a topic by creating their own documents and putting them together in a playlist (and making a quiz at the end).  I have even more ideas, but I will save them for a later post.
  
• The playlists are easy for students to use.  I gave a brief overview of how to use the learning playlist (brief = 1 minute), and my students have used them without frustration, tears, or wails of lament about using technology.  When asked how it was to use them, all I got was shrugs and comments of "Very simple." 
  
• Students can do the work of learning and construct their own meaning using these learning playlists.  To me, this is a great alternative to lecture.  If you choose to use these to deliver instruction, these playlists allow a teacher to plan for and set up what learning will take place, along with empowering students to do the work of learning if the playlist is set up that way.  (Like any learning tool, it can be used for educational good or evil.  Please don't use this in the spirit of "more memorized stuff is better learning.")   I know that some teachers, especially newer ones that for some reason have never been taught to use educational technology of any kind except PowerPoint and an overhead projector, have a hard time knowing what else to do besides lecture--I know I did when I first started oh-so-many-moons ago--and this is a great and easy alternative to offer those teachers (along with TED Ed and Embedr).
  

MentorMob is one of those web tools that I think has great potential--not for filling students' heads with content, but having them view resources and make sense of what they're learning.  While it does take time to collect and choose the resources you put in the playlist, I think the time is well-spent--much better spent than time lecturing at students.

I have two very loud, very furry, and very cute Shetland Sheepdogs.  They get a lot of food meant for people put into their stomachs by my husband (who cannot resist the cute begging faces my pups practice in the mirror while we are gone.  Pushover).  They also like to greet me by the bed every morning when my alarm goes off, seeing as I'm the first to rise at 4 A.M. every day.  After hearing the alarm, they expect me, as their slave who is now awake, to let them outside so they can bark wildly into the dark at either a) nothing, b) a rabbit, or c) something coming to kill me.  This morning, as I rolled over to shut off the alarm, the younger one who I am convinced has been broken since the day we bought her jumped up on the bed and issued a resounding up-close-and-personal burp to my face.

That pretty much set the tone for the day.  Only instead of real burps in my face, I kept getting verbal ones.  

I know it's probably because we are nearing the end of the school year and everyone is frustrated, tired, and overwhelmed with all of the end-of-the-year stuff we do, but all day it seemed that attitudes, beliefs, and ideas about teaching that disappoint me were getting burped out into the atmosphere, and some evil teaching jet stream brought them all into my room.  It got me thinking about why people get into teaching in the first place--and what teaching should be all about.

From my experiences, I think teaching is about:

• getting students to do the learning.  If we're the ones talking all the time, when is the learning happening?
  
• giving students power over their own learning by teaching them how to learn, how to deal with uncertainty and how to learn from failure.  You can only do that once you let students take the reins of their own learning.
  
• focusing on content as a vehicle for learning, not the learning.  This means building your core curriculum around the "need-to-knows" that are useful to teach students how to learn.  More content isn't better if they don't know how to remember it, recall it, or apply it to a new situation.
  
• remembering that planning isn't about making things easy for us as teachers all the time; we're here to help students learn, and sometimes that means a lot of work.
  
• not settling for "good enough."  Ever.  From ourselves or from our students.
  
• knowing we have one of the hardest and one of the most rewarding jobs at the same time.  

I'm not perfect.  I forget what teaching should be about probably as often as I frantically search for where I put down my work keys.  But maybe that's what these kinds of days are meant to do--serve as a reminder from the cosmos to slow down and refocus.

And to remind me to not let the dogs on the bed tomorrow morning.

One of the more important lessons I learned from my first year of standards-based scoring was this: I had to do a better job at helping students really understand what each level in my system (this year a 0-5) looked like.  I will never forget when a student from last year wrote me a little note on one of her tests that said, "Mrs. E, I really want to get a 4, but I don't know how."

That statement crushed me.  But it also told me exactly what I had to do this year in order to help students see what mastery is (or, in my classroom lingo this year, how to "know & own" the understanding). 

But there's not just one way to show students what mastery looks like. I've found that helping students see the difference between a 1 and a 2 and a 3 and a 4 and a 5 is an ongoing process in a standards-based classroom; it's something you must constantly and consistently do, and do in a variety of ways.  If not, what my students do is start viewing the levels in the more traditional view of numbers and letters and accumulating points instead of understanding, and start focusing on everything about grading that has nothing to do with their actual knowledge and learning of concepts.  (I'm actually thinking about switching to a system with just three levels--get it and use it, get it, don't get it--but I haven't worked out the details concerning how to make this mesh with how I report scores in the conventional gradebook I am made to use.  More on that in a future post after I work out the kinks.)

Below are some activities that I have students do in order to gauge their level of mastery.  Basically these are basic metacognitive strategies, designed to get students to think about their thinking--and their learning. 

• Write your multiple choice answer choices on assessments (either formative or summative) at different levels, and have students discuss the answer choices in order to determine at which level of mastery each answer is.  During the first semester, I used Edmodo quizzes extensively to administer formative assessments (I call them "progress checks") after every few I can statements studied.  When I write the multiple choice for these progress checks, I assess each I can statement with a separate question, and write that I can statement number at the end of the question.  I then write the four answer choices at 4 different levels--one for each level of mastery in my scoring scale.  Whatever answer choice students select, that reveals at what level of mastery they currently are for that I can statement.  After students take the progress check, they are allowed to see their answers right away.  However, in Edmodo, it only tells them what the level 4 answer is (the "correct" one).  So, what I had them do after the first bazillion progress checks we took was have them discuss with each other what level of understanding the other choices were at, and then we went over them together.  This was an eye-opening experience for me; just to hear what some of their reasons for what choices were at what level told me that a) I had a heck of a lot more metacognitive work to do with them, and b) "gaming" the system was an inherent part of what they thought learning was.  However, after doing this constantly and consistently, students are (I think) starting to think about answering these questions in terms of understanding rather than things like "this answer is the longest so it must be the right one."
  
• For short answer questions on formative assessments, have students compare what they answered to what an answer that demonstrates mastery looks like, and then do some reflection.  I let students see what a level 4 answer looks like by revealing the answers to them as soon after an assessment as possible (if it's formative, they will always immediately get to see their answers).  Then, I have them compare their answer with a level 4 answer I wrote out ahead of time in the answer key.  When they do this comparison,  they basically score themselves--they write out what level they think their answer is, and list the reasons (citing evidence from their answer and from the answer that demonstrates full mastery).  They are also required to state what they will do to fix their answer in order to show mastery on the final progress check (where I score answers to put in my gradebook, unfortunately).  This is somewhat hard for students who are used to slapping down one-word or one-sentence answers hoping to scrape up a point or two; they're used to the system letting them skate through with how little they have learned undetected.  It's also hard for my traditionally "high achieving" students, who come to the slow realization that memorizing what I put as the mastery answer--instead of owning the knowledge by putting it in terms their brains understand--will earn them a rating of "no evidence of understanding" (this happened a LOT at the start of the year).  I do like having students do this type of "answer analysis" activity, however, because it exposes the holes in the system through which some kids jump to avoid learning, and helps me plan for ways to seal up those holes.
  
• Have students keep track their learning progress.  I stole this idea outright from Marzano, but I have set it up in a different way that works better for my students and myself (in my humble opinion).   I have students keep track of their learning in a Google spreadsheet that I have named a "How Am I Doing Spreadsheet."  (I've talked about this before in this post.)  You can see the one they are currently using for molecular and Mendelian genetics here, or check it out below.  But the key to using this is having students use it frequently (again, metacognition must be constant and consistent), which means they are instructed to go back and reevaluate their learning and where they're at every few days, re-rating themselves on my scoring system frequently.  The advantage in doing this is that students can see that they are making progress (or not) towards mastery.  You see, some students aren't aware that they are actually learning; it's usually those students with those fixed-mindset attitudes of "I'm dumb" or "I'm bad at science and I always will be" or "School sucks and so do you."  Once these students see that, yes, they are moving up along the learning scale and can actually master material, a new motivation kicks in that's wonderful to see.  Conversely, it also helps students who are used to getting A's for keeping their binders organized, being polite, and not causing trouble see that they still have more work to do towards learning the course concepts.  No matter what student is using it, this spreadsheet becomes an invaluable tool when they start reviewing for their final progress checks; since they have kept track of their learning throughout the unit, they can see where the focus of their studying should be, and then they must generate ways to fix their knowledge and reach mastery.  
  

Those are the three primary ways I help students see what mastery looks like in my room.  They're not fancy, earth-shattering, or mind-bending, but I believe they are effective if used constantly and consistently.   Are they magic bullets of metacognition that will turn all students into mighty monsters of learning?  Nope.  I have a few students who (passively) fight me when we do all of these things, from refusing to discuss their answers to their progress checks to filling out the spreadsheet in a "I'm only doing this because she said I had to" way.  This always happens when you try to do anything with a group of young humans, I've found.

But I have to believe that it's the experience of doing these activities that matters with those younger humans who fight my metacognitive efforts, even if they're not reaping the benefits of them.  My teacher-self hangs on to the belief that there will come a day when they'll look back on my class and think, "Oh, so that's what she was trying to make me do--learn what learning looks like."

Recently I have gotten a lot of feedback on my previous PBL posts, mainly asking me how I develop my PBL ideas.  So, I thought it might be a good idea to let everyone take a peek at the process I use to write my PBLs.  Just be warned that I haven't yet perfected the art of crafting a PBL yet, but hopefully some of this will help you in any PBL writing you may do.

• Decide that I want to write a PBL about a particular topic.  For example, molecular and Mendelian genetics.
  
• Sit down at my computer and stare at a blank Google Doc for a while, trying to think of totally new, earth-shattering problems that will take my students' minds to new levels of critical thinking.
  
• Get up and annoy all nearby coworkers by  bouncing my ideas off them, including the physics teacher who tells me he hasn't done a genetics Punnet square since he was in 8th grade.  Privately question relevance of making students do Punnet squares.
  
• Sit back down at computer and stare at blank Google Doc for 5 more minutes.
  
• Revisit my objectives for the unit (which I believe you should have nailed down before designing anything remotely PBL-related), hoping that re-reading them will give me some sort of PBL inspiration.
• Stop trying to reinvent the PBL wheel and do a Google search for ideas.
  
• Get sucked into some great science articles and learn lots of new information based on current research (Yeah, I'm talking to you, Nature).  
• Refocus and find more useful things on the internet like the document below (which I found here and you can find a copy here):
  

• Wonder why almost every Google search I do for PBL ideas involves urine in some way, shape, or form.
• Determine that  I like the basics of what I've found in the document above, but my perfectionist tendencies rear their ugly heads and stop me from using it as-is.  Why? Because the case given above isn't really a problem; it's a case, which is designed for a different purpose.  This is fantastic for promoting discussion; however, if you look carefully at the entire document, you realize that this document is too helpful (to use Dan Meyer's terminology).  It does most of the thinking for them--which is what students in a case-based teaching format are supposed to pick out from how the case is written and then draw further conclusions.  However, I'm looking for them to do all of the thinking; as a problem, this case needs some reworking so students can solve the boy's problem, not have it explained to them. 
  
• Rewrite the case as a problem, with some curveballs thrown in. My students are taking on the role of a doctor again, only this time they will have two problems with which to contend: the first is to come up with the diagnosis for the baby in this case, and the second is to determine the pattern of inheritance and develop their own pedigree without it being laid out for them.  They are provided with a list of symptoms, but I was a learning jerk about this--I researched some diseases with similar symptoms and threw those in to the overall list.  They were also given a brief genetic history of the family, with some extraneous information included as well.  I'm not actually doing this because I enjoy being a jerk to my students; I'm doing this to make the problem messier.  Because real problems are really messy, and involve weeding out information that really isn't useful to find what you really need.
• Make sure I eliminate all specific details from the problem so that one Google search won't enable them to find the above document or find the "answer" within 5 minutes of searching. For example, I left out the three specific amino acids that cause the maple syrup urine disease that are listed in the case, and use the general term "amino acids."
• Sigh with relief that I am ready to go with this PBL.
  
• Internally swear as I remember things I forgot to include.  Go back and edit the document a few more times. (You can see it in its current version here.)
  
• Relax, thinking I am now done with my PBL.
  
• Panic after realizing I haven't written up the entire activity on the class website.  Go do that.
  
• Look at the clock, realize its almost 7 P.M. and I'm still at work--and my poor dogs still haven't been let out yet and have probably expressed their displeasure on something expensive in the house.

Like I said, I haven't perfected the process ( I really have to work on that whole "staying until 7 P.M." thing), but this is pretty much what I go through every time.  If I don't find any ideas on the internet I can reshape, I do end up creating my own activities--with a lot of help from my annoyed coworkers, who are infinitely patient and will give me great feedback on how I can improve the activity.  I know these aren't profound societal problems my students are solving here, but really, with PBL, I think most of the time it's more about the process--and teaching students how to learn and think on their own.

If you have any other great ways you come up with PBL activities, please feel free to share.