Give Your Students "College Ready" Texts They'll WANT To Read

Its no secret that the ACT (and success in college as a whole) is dependent upon a high-level of reading comprehension. The science section on the ACT has much, much more to do with reading and understanding a non-fiction, technical text than it does your memory of mitosis or Newton's 3rd law.

That being said, it be hard to avoid the importance of raising reading skills in my ACT Prep class this summer. I haven't looked at my students' benchmarked reading scores from the school year, but given the
"don't-you-dare-call-on-me" silence of death I've gotten our 2 days of class when I asked for a reader, I'd be willing to bet they are not high. I don't think the students at my school WANT to be poor readers, and most of our low readers probably carry some shame about and would put in work to raise their skills, but putting in the hard work of catching up using reading texts that are not of personal interest to them creates a mental barrier. Rather than hurdle/climb/scratch/claw over it, many of our readers go the easier route of blaming something/someone else for their deficiencies, or they resign to "I'm not a good reader."

As I was perusing the Chrome Web Store this week looking for more utility to add to my Chromebook, I ran into Newsela, a news aggregator that promises to give my students articles that will be of interest to them at a lexile/grade level score that I can set to best support them.

I had really hoped Newsela ran on some super platform that used some fancy coding to take any article a student could throw at and replace synonyms, interpret meaning, and chunk long passages into shorter ones, but apparently I live in the future.

Newsela DOES have a respectable amount of articles to choose from (updated daily), and I was even able to find one about the dance team from a school in my district that the +St Louis Post-Dispatch profiled last fall.

Here's what Newsela allows you to do with any of the articles on the site:

• Assign to students for reading. From their student account, they pull up their "binder" to find what you have curated for them.
• Set a lexile level for them to scaffold vocabulary weaknesses while focusing on comprehension
• Assess comprehension with a quiz that they put together or a writing prompt
• Highlight and annotate passages to give your students extra insight or further scaffold their reading.

To share some of how it works, here's a few screenshots of my perusing that article:

This is the layout of an article on Newsela. You have options to assign the article (or to hide it) at the top, the text in the main column with sharing buttons above the title, and choices to differentiate reading levels and assessment on the right in blue.

Newsela doesn't ONLY replace "higher" words for lower, the editorial staff also provides subtitles and headings the lower you go down lexicles. This is the same paragraph on the 5th grade and 12th grade reading level.

Is it a PERFECT tool for getting your students relatable content? Probably not, but it gets you a long way in its ability to provide choice and scaffolding for your readers, and its faster than a classroom trip to the library for students to find and choose books on the appropriate level.

Using Visual Notes for Memory and Understanding

Are you an doodler? Associating notes and terms with images is helpful for recalling information later, so doodling (or finding images that relate and then pasting in) is a good strategy for taking something mundane like note-taking and creating an "experience" that will be easier to call upon during test time. I still remember the tank I drew with icicles hanging from it in 10th grade on my Cold War notes.

This brings me to today's use of visual notes. As much as it pains me to say, "victory" on the ACT does not always go to the "smartest" students, but instead, to those who can best play the game. In a bubble, I'd much rather teach math concepts and skills, but when it comes to gaming the ACT, sometimes those get in the way.

This is best exemplified in my experience from my 2 experiences taking the ACT as a student. The first time, I had a TI-83 at my side, checking every graph and solution I could, searching for just the right formula. I didn't finish that section - I don't even remember being that close. The second time I took the ACT, I did not have the graphing calculator (I have no idea where the graphing calculator I'd been using went) - I didn't even have a scientific calculator! I told my dad on the way to the test that I needed to get a calculator, so we stopped at a supermarket, bought a 2 dollar four function calculator. The magic of my 2 dollar calculator test was that I HAD to skip around to the things I could do easiest. I was much more agile in my thinking, skipped around more quickly when I felt stuck, and actually did 5 points higher that time. My "knowledge" got in the way the first time from me showing what I definitely knew, and there were probably some questions I could have done that I never got to.

I found a list of strategies for each section of the ACT on sparknotes.com for my students and I've tasked them to make a "poster" for each section and the included strategies. My skill set and interest leans toward illustrating in any whiteboard or drawing app, but I left open the option for using the PicCollage app to bring in images and text or Haiku Deck to make a slide show with an image for each strategy.

Here's the example I created using the Paper app based on tips from this video that I showed earlier in class:

Here's a preliminary student example:

My favorite part of this one is the crossed arms emoji for "eliminate answers". :)

More visual notes resources:
6 Apps To Visualize Notes on iPad
Sketchnotes and Visual Thinking Note-taking - This page summarizes and links to many OTHER resources
Show with Media: Visual Note-taking

Happy note-taking!

The ACT: Does it Rock or Does it Suck? Pt 2

Yesterday, all 1200+ juniors in the Ferguson-Florissant School District took part in a special administration of the ACT on-site. (As did the Rockwood School District further west in St. Louis County, and Liberty North High School near Kansas City.) The weight and scale of this undertaking required a ton of planning, training, and discussion, so the ACT has been heavy on rotation around here for most of the semester. As we got closer to the date on Tuesday, I got to wondering - does the ACT rock, or does it suck? 

In part 1 of this series, I gave 5 reasons why the ACT is good for our students. This post explores the other side.

I had a student declare on Monday, "I'm gonna get a 35 on that ACT." Without much hesitation, I told him he had no chance. In reflection, I probably could have delivered the message with more love, but there are several reasons I could tell him that quite certainly.

• We were doing bellwork on basic trig ratios, which he had just announced he could not do.
• Any junior scoring that well at my school would probably be in calculus. He's at least 3 courses behind that.
• No students from my school have done that well for several years. That's not to say it couldn't happen this year, but that it wouldn't be from a student in this course. There are simply several concepts he's not had much, if any exposure to.
• You don't just decide one day you want a 35 on the ACT - (with statistical exception) it take years of discipline to math study if math is a personal strength, much less a weakness you're trying to improve upon.

But he doesn't know any of these things, nor is he even in much of a place to hear them. He took "that's impossible" as a personal indictment on his future success. Because a student would let a test have that much power over his life, his self-worth, and dreams for the future, the ACT (and other standardized tests like them) SUCK.

4 Reasons the ACT Sucks

1. The test steals from opportunities for studying "interesting" topics to serve itself.
Stress to raise scores for the sake of funding or accreditation (in schools) or scholarships (for individual students) narrows math instruction to the discrete set of "on the test". Instead of perhaps devoting more time in class to open-ended projects or questions, we do things like "ACT Tuesday". Students spend any extra personal time for math they may be willing to devote in test prep than in exploring personal interests that ignite passion for further studies.

2. The test is expensive. 
Kids that are probably most likely to go to college AND most likely to need scholarships are dunder the most pressure. From my perspective, if only one of those is true, the student either receives "free and reduced lunch" waivers for the test, or the student's on the other end and their families can pick up at least some of the tab. For kids in the middle, the cost of each exam is also a conderations as they seek better scores.

3. Results from the test are sometimes misused to perpetrate or enforce stereotypes.
Students attach self worth to their scores, and even to their communities, and the media doesn't help when they use the scores to grade districts. When kids that don't look like them do well and kids that do look like them do not, students internalize the message.

4. ACT prep courses replace "real" electives.

If the purpose of elective courses and credits is to structure time in the high school curriculum to encourage students to study subjects of personal interest or to offer courses outside of "core" courses (even with core subjects), then we do a disservice to our students shuffling many of them through our ACT prep courses. They help in the short-term - potentially raising kids' scores to open more doors - but once they get to their place of post-secondary ed, what more do they know about themselves or their passions? When the end goal is getting kids out the door and on to a university without as much care to knowing why they should be going, it's no wonder to me that so many students wander through college courses, paying top-dollar to hopefully find something, anything that sticks. (And it's also no wonder that so many dropout before the find "the one".)

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What do you think? Are the benefits I listed yesterday worth the costs above? Is the problem the ACT, or is it the system?

The ACT: Does It Rock or Does it Suck? Pt 1

Our district is administering the ACT to all 1200+ juniors during the school day tomorrow, so its been on our minds even more than usual around here. Love it or hate it, the ACT and standardized tests like it are not leaving the American educational landscape anytime soon. 

I've been reflecting on the explicit and implicit information that preparing for, taking, and interpreting the test's results gives us and our students, so I wondered, does it rock, or does it suck? Today, in Part 1, I'll explore 5 ways the ACT rocks.

1. Comparisons between individual states, districts, schools, and even students.

Because the ACT eliminates factors that can be tweaked and fiddled with locally such as letter grade scales, state assessment rules, GPAs, and general grade inflation/deflation, it allows for more straightforward comparisons. A solid ACT score from a student coming from a weaker district takes any asterisks off a transcript that a selection committee may be tempted to apply to a student.

2. The ACT as a set of national standards.

The ACT (and SAT) have served as a sort of national "standards" since long before states began adopting the common core. "Adoption" is truly optional relative to any given state's emphasis on tracking scores or the universities within that state emphasizing it in admittance guidelines. Along with the SAT, it even competes in a dynamic similar to the two consortia dedicated to administering common core tests for students (Smarter Balanced and PARCC)

3. Empowering students to evaluate their own learning.

More than letter grades or standards, the ACT gives students a benchmark by which they can measure their own learning progress or quality of learning. Sure, there may still be an element of "I don't test well," to factor into the discussion, but after several attempts a student's score should be relatively representative of what they have learned in high school.

4. Initiating Goal Setting

Improving their ACT score is some students' first practice in goal setting. "I want a score of ____ on the ACT" is even just an intermediary goal to larger, long term goals. Career goals beget college choices. College choices beget ACT goals for admittance requirements. Admittance requirements beget higher ACT goals for scholarships at that student's particular school of choice. I've seen many students dramatically change their focus on the ACT (and school in general) after they found out they were probably unlikely to get into a school they were hoping to attend. 

5. Encouraging Self-Discipline

Beyond (but related) to goal setting, improving their ACT score is some students' first practice in self-discipline. You don't wake up on exam day and expect to meet your new goal. Like improvement in anything, it takes the time and consistency of practice and sacrificing of other, more "fun" choices. Especially for students that don't play sports or a musical instrument, reaching for an ACT goal gives real practice in what it takes to dream a dream and see it through.

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Do you think the ACT sucks? Check out part 2 here.