Week 16: CATE 2015 and the Stand-Up Quiz

CATE 2015

Yesterday, I was in San Jose, CA for the 2015 CATE conference. It was a whirlwind of a day, flying up and back in about 12 hours. At the conference, I presented on the PostSecret project that I do with my students. I was a little nervous - more about whether or not all of the technology would work than actually presenting - but it wound up going really well!

Thank you to all those who attended my session. I have been playing around with the PostSecret Universe app today. I came across this video. I don't know why, but when I saw it, I felt the need to share it with you. It exemplifies the connections that are possible and the lives that can be saved through PostSecret and the people of the PostSecret community. If you have any secrets dealing with suicide, you should consider showing this video to your students.

If you didn't attend my session, but you are curious about the project, here is the presentation. If you have questions about how I use the project in my classes or about implementing the project with your students, please just ask. I encourage you to try the project and make it work for you and your students. In fact, here is a secret from the new app with a very interesting idea for a class project...

If you have never attended the annual CATE conference, I encourage you to do so in the future. It is a gathering of English teachers from all across California (and sometimes other states as well) who come together to talk about all the good things they are doing in their classes. For an English teacher, it is one of the few conferences that feeds your soul and makes you excited about returning to the classroom the following Monday. Next year, the conference will be held in Costa Mesa (Orange County), so hopefully a few more of my colleagues from Fallbrook High School will be able to attend; it would be wonderful if we could get a Fallbrook cohort together to attend these conferences regularly. 

Stand-Up Quiz

Okay... so back to what's going on in my classroom... 

At the beginning of this past week, I decided I needed to change my Monday vocabulary routine in ELD 2. Usually, I would give the students their vocabulary worksheet (here's an example) and then go through a presentation in which I gave them the part of speech, definition, synonym, and antonym for each word. Most of the time, I would leave the synonym and antonym portion of the presentation blank and, while presenting, ask the class to think of a synonym and antonym for each word. While this worked, as you can imagine, it did not engage the entire class. I would have one or two students who would shout out words while the others sat and stared blankly at the screen. (This is not an easy activity for students in ELD 2 because of their limited vocabulary.) A couple of times, I tried to make it into a game and had my TA keep track of how many words each student came up with, but I wasn't really satisfied with this approach. I needed to do something, but I also didn't want to completely abandon our routine. 

As I was preparing for class on Sunday evening, I decided I would go through the entire presentation and only give them the part of speech and definition for each word, and then I would have the kids work in groups to come up with the synonym s and antonyms. "Perfect!" I thought. "This will ensure that each kid is actually thinking. But how then what do we do? How do they share out?" I'll admit that I didn't come up with a solution right then; I decided I could just figure it out in class the next day.

In class, I told the students about the change, and they did not protest. I gave them the information I had for them and then had them turn their desks into their groups. I expected to see them all start working immediately, but they just sat there. Even after I told them to get to work, gave them permission to use their phones, and handed some of them dictionaries, most of them still just sat there staring at their vocabulary worksheets. Only one group really started working as I had expected - each student began looking up the words, they discussed different options for synonyms and antonyms, and they made sure each group member had the words they chose; they talked to each other and helped each other just like you would expect any group to do. The other two groups (yes, there were only three groups because I only have thirteen students in the class; ridiculous... I know...) just sat there. After much prodding, one or two students in each of those two groups began looking up words and writing down information, but the students who began working didn't talk to their other group members about what they were doing; they just worked as if I hadn't told them to work in a group at all. 

I walked around. I prodded. I encouraged. I assigned tasks. I thought, "Maybe they just don't know how to work in a group..." But then I realized that I had had them work in groups a million times prior to this, and they had not had any problem doing so. I honestly have no idea what the problem was, but it was painful to watch. Tomorrow, I think I am just going to split up the words, assign a chunk to each student, and then have them share what they come up with at the end to their group; I would prefer that they come up with the synonyms and antonyms together, but... it just did not work for those two groups. If you have any suggestions to get them working together, please, please, please let me know.

Anyway, once they all finally had a synonym and antonym for each word, I wanted them to share out, so we could discuss them, and I could check to make sure they actually understood the vocabulary word. I decided to use the stand-up quiz to do so. This is a strategy that I have only used once or twice in my time as a teacher, but it was a go-to strategy for our former ELD 1 teacher. I always liked the strategy; I just never remembered to use it. Basically, you have the entire class stand up, and then you start asking them questions. When a student correctly answers a question, he/she (or his/her group or row, depending on how you want to structure the quiz and how many questions you have) may sit down. (Since my class is so small, I only let the individual who answered sit down after volunteering to give me a synonym and antonym for a word.) You keep asking questions until everyone is sitting down. 

Even though the group work did not go well, this went beautifully! The strategy was exactly what I was looking for. All of the students were actively engaged; they were raising their hands to give me words; they were checking their papers to make sure the words they had were correct. So, while I still need to re-think how I get my students to work in groups on this assignment, I am definitely going to make the stand-up quiz a staple in our vocabulary routine. (And I will probably try to start incorporating it into my English 11 classes, as well.)
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Ease of use: The stand-up quiz is on of the easiest formative assessments to include in your instruction. You can prepare questions in advance, or you can just come up with them on the spot. You don't need any extra space in your classroom, like you do for an activity like "lines of communication" or "inside-outside circles", since the students can just stand at their desks. Easy, easy, easy. You just have to remember to do it...
Would I use this again: Yep. As I said, I am going to start doing this on a weekly basis. (I may even do it more often than that.)
Downsides: You need to have something that holds the students accountable once they are sitting down. If you do an impromptu stand-up quiz, you should tell the students to write down the questions and answers (or something along those lines), so they don't tune out once they are sitting down.
Applications: You can pretty much do this with any topic in any subject area. I did this with synonyms and antonyms for vocabulary, but you can do it with anything you want. You can do it with questions from all levels of Bloom's taxonomy. You can do it with math questions. You can do it in P.E. You can ask questions, or you can ask the students to demonstrate some skill. It is one of those wonderful strategies that is applicable almost anywhere.