Reviewing for finals

When it comes to assessments, I am far more interested in how students can process and synthesize what we've worked on than in their recollection powers. Nonetheless, at this time of year, we are almost all faced with the necessity of preparing students for tests which call for multiple choice, true-false, matching, sequencing or rank ordering questions which test memorized material.

I am one of those teachers who likes to use games and competition to motivate and energize students. I know there are teachers who have reservations about this because some students will feel like "losers", inferior and less talented. Moreover, popular games like Jeopardy and Bingo put a premium on speed, which is a problem for slower-processing students, who need to review as much or more than your rapid processors.

This game, Team Game Tournament, permits students to compete at their own skill level (as you the teacher judge it). The game takes a fair amount of preparation--about an evening's worth. But once you've done that, the game runs itself, and you will not have to be "host" or "referee" during the game, but merely circulate to keep everyone on task.

First, you need to prepare enough short questions to keep them busy for an entire period. After a few years of the same course, most of us have acquired alternate tests for each unit of study, which leaves extra unused tests each year. Take the questions you have not used (and are not going to use on the exam), duplicate them so that you have one for each competition table (I'll explain that in a minute) and cut them into individual slips with the answer on them. Take each complete set and put it in an envelope (if there are a lot, you might want to use small manila envelopes instead of #10 office envelopes. You will have to make a guess about how many questions you need. I've had classes that can't get through 50 in one 48-minute period, and some that went through 100 and had time to spare--and that would be true across all skill levels. So you make a guess.

Now, group your students in groups of 3 or 4 according to homogeneous skill level. Those groupings will be your table groups, like this:

Table 1	Table 2	Table 3	Table 4
Alice	Ethan	Isabella	Mercedes
Bobby	Fiona	Jared	Norman
Charles	Georgia	Kaley	Oscar
Diane	Harold	Lawrence	Penelope

Now, from your table groups, you select heterogeneous groups, incorporating all different skill levels. These are the competition teams, which will accumulate points. I like to have the students name the teams, maybe make up cheers, so they feel some slight sense of belonging. You can even put the teams together the day before, when they don't even know what game they will be playing yet. So here are my teams for this class:

Paisley Moonbats	American Idiots	Pikachu Pals	Twilight Rocks!
Alice	Bobby	Charles	Diane
Ethan	Fiona	Georgia	Harold
Isabella	Jared	Kaley	Lawrence
Mercedes	Norman	Oscar	Penelope

I took the names as they appeared in order, but you might fool around with the groupings to get an even balance of genders, etc. The names are examples of the kinds of names I've had with these games over the past few years.

Now you are ready for your class. First put them in their TEAM groups (not the tables), have them come up with a name, put the names on the board.

Then, send them to their tournament tables--1, 2, 3, 4. The students sit in a circle at the tournament table. In my last few classrooms, the tournament tables are made up of those one-piece desk-and-chair combos arranged so the students face each other. Each table has one of the envelopes filled with slips, each with one question on it.

One student will take the envelope, remove one and only one slip, and read the question to the student on her left. If the student on the left has the right answer, they take and keep the slip. If the student does NOT have the right answer, the questioner does NOT read the correct answer. Instead, the questioner puts the slip back in the envelope.

"But," you think "that student might get that question later and they have already seen the right answer." The answer is--so what?--it's a review game, not a test, and everyone is just as likely as everyone else to benefit from that scenario. So you are rewarded for reading and remembering the correct answers.

Right or wrong, the questioner hands the envelope to the player on her left. The new questioner takes a slip and turns to the student on HIS left and asks him the next question, with the same procedure for right and wrong answers. They continue in a clockwise fashion until all the questions have been asked or you call time.

You might consider calling time and doing an interim score in the middle, especially if you have periods of 60 or more minutes, just to break up the monotony, and give a fresh spur to the students as they continue.

When they finish playing the students should all have some slips in their possession, of the questions they have answered correctly. That is not necessarily their point value. Otherwise, the high-skill level students will have higher numbers of than the lower-skill students. Instead, you use this scoring rubric, assigning points according to table RANK, not the absolute number of slips obtained:

TEAM GAME TOURNAMENT SCORING

For a Four Player Game

Player	No Ties	Tie for Top	Tie for Middle	Tie for Low	3-way tie for Top	3-way tie for middle	3-way tie for low	Tie for Low and High
Top Scorer	6 points	5	6	6	5	6	4	5
High Middle Scorer	4	5	4	4	5	3	4	5
Low Middle Scorer	3	3	4	3	5	3	4	3
Low Scorer	2	2	2	3	2	3	4	3

For a Three Player Game

Player	No Ties	Tie for Top Score	Tie for Low Score	Three Way Tie
Top Scorer	6 points	5	6	4
Middle Scorer	4 points	5	3	4
Low Scorer	2 points	2	3	4

So if at table A, Alice has 13, Bobby has 17, Charlie has 12 and Diane has 18 slips, their scores are Diane 6 points, Bobby 4 points, Alice 3 points and Charlie has 2 points. (Depending on your class, you might want to distribute chips for the points, so they don't confuse those numbers with the number of slips they acquired.)

Once all the tables have worked out their points earned, students return to their teams and add up the points. Properly done, the scores should be fairly close together, and the competition pretty tight. That is one of the objects of the game, besides providing review, to avoid blow-outs, and to make every student feel that they have a chance of making a significant contribution to their team's point total.

This may seem a little complicated and does require a good amount of prep, but once you've done that, you can just wind it up and watch it go. Just explain the rules and keep moving around to handle questions or help people get unstuck. Don't get sucked into adjudicating or giving hints on answers. They're right or wrong, and there are lots of other chances. Everyone should try and move as swiftly as possible to cover as much material as possible.

One caveat--upperclassmen in high school may be a bit too "cool" to be motivated by competition. You have to gauge your room and figure out what motivates them for review. But I guarantee it is more effective than simply handing out a sheet with the "important information." (Which I do anyway.)

No market for educational innovation

A faithful reader of this blog, who is a research programmer, wrote me the following:

I read [the Gladwell piece] and also the piece about the rise and fall of Jaime Escalante, and it made me start thinking about teacher quality metrics, and the lack of a marketplace for teachers.

It may be hard to measure teacher performance externally, but it does seem like teachers all know who the best teachers are in their department or school. Students also have preferences (like on RateMyTeacher.com) which are probably more highly correlated with academic quality than one might think. I think those two measures are probably enough to allow the cream to rise, as it were, but where would it go?

As that article points out - good teachers are probably already quite close to their maximum possible achievement, and far from their potential. Contrast this with hackers, who are similarly difficult to rate (except, in parallel, by their peers and by their users), but who have lots of options for reaching their potential.

There are a few reasons that come to mind:

1. Locality
Teachers have to teach somewhere near their home. This limits the kind of schools they can teach at. This often limits the freedom they have to create effective programs in proportion to the open-mindedness of the administrators in their area. Hackers can code from anywhere. The greatest hackers have whole cities basically built around them (like Seattle). This brings me to the second point...

2. No market
There is no market for teachers. I don't mean that teachers can't find work (though that might be the case), but that teachers HAVE to find work. Why aren't schools looking for the best teachers? Why isn't there more buzz around high quality teachers? Of course, teacher quality has to be a power law distribution, and we often do hear about the exceptional teachers at the tail, like Jaime Escalante, but I think the tail is fatter than we are led to believe. Headhunters are always seeking out new programmers who they think have potential. Good programmers might even decide to start their own company, like some of the most influential people in technology, which brings me to...

3. No Entrepreneurship
If a teacher thinks his/her school is being run incorrectly, or if he/she has some idea about how to do it better, there are only a few things he/she can do, and starting their own school is only just barely starting to become one of them. One reason it's hard to put up your shingle is that schools cost a lot of money to start, which brings me to the next point...

4. No money
There are limits to the ways you can incentivize great teachers to come to your school within the public system (which means a vast majority of the schools in the US). Salaries are standardized by degrees and experience, which are elements among the least correlated with performance. But money is not why teachers teach (clearly). One thing I think is even more important is the chance to work with other great teachers.

5. No Center
If you want to be film star, you move to Hollywood. If you want to be a financier, you move to Wall Street. If you want to start a technology company, you move to Silicon Valley. Where is the capital of secondary education? Nowhere. Great school teachers usually just stay wherever they are (thus, point 1). You might think that a central location might be unfair, giving the residents a much better education than people get in the rest of the country. That's true, but follow me down this rabbit hole a bit.

What these centers of film and technology and finance do is drive up the quality of their goods and services for everyone. If Silicon Valley didn't exist, neither would any of the top computer science departments around the world. For one thing, it's a carrot. For another, bringing the best people together always makes them do better work than they would have separately. They create the state of the art that everyone must catch up to.

Personally, I have no idea why no school district in the world is actively trying to become this center. Of course, all districts want to have great schools. Some even want to have innovative schools, which is a start. But there is no school district trying to hire the greatest teachers in the world. I don't even know of a school district with a single recruiter. [Note - This writer subsequently noted that universities could be a logical place for gathering people interested in improving and developing education.]

There is, of course a lot of friction around any change in education, which isn't helped by the fact that everyone thinks they're an expert (look who's talking), but regardless of philosophy it's clear that the best teachers are much farther above average than the average teacher is above dismal.

Interesting ideas. And the problems are exacerbated with the fact that education is intimately tied up with local politics--in most places in the US, it is the most important and expensive function that small municipalities perform. This ties education to a lot of non-educational issues. One of the principal attractions of charter schools is their removal from the pettiness and irrationality of local politics.

The lack of mobility in teaching is one of the most frustrating and destructive aspects of the work, especially for those of us who come from other professional spheres. It is outrageous that one can't plan a career of building skills from one institution to another, learning one way to teach in suburbia, another in an inner city, another in rural district, one way in a technologically-oriented school, another in a less advantaged place. One is encouraged to plop down in the first place you get a job and set down roots as soon as possible. After one's student teaching, one rarely sees another teacher operate in a classroom. (I was lucky to have spent my first four years team teaching--without that experience I would be pathetically incompetent today.)

And of course, the consumers of this service have little or no say in selecting who to accept the service from. That is, public school students have little or no choice of teachers.

The teacher's unions are screaming bloody murder about this, and I will probably write about that soon, but surely there is some way to address the issue of quality and genuine professional development (not take a course for a day and get a piece of paper) without destroying the entire bargaining unit system.