My first attempt at a blog

I am not sure if I am doing this correctly, but here goes . . . I know class is an hour away, but I wanted to do this before I got there.  Luckily, I was able to leave work early enough to have the time to "blog" . . . I am doing the free list, rank order, pile sort activity with HyoIn.  Our topic was vacation destinations.  However, I also wanted to see how this would work with a school-related topic.  So, I did another one on my own.  I asked six people to list 10 things they would find in a productive classroom.  I am interested in teacher evaluation and thought that this might give me an idea of what teachers and administrators thought was important in effective teaching.  It was interesting that the teachers tend to focus more on what the students are doing and the administrators/mentor teachers focus on both what the students are doing as well as what the teachers are doing.  The top 10 ended up being Students working or participating in class activity Teacher monitors students Cooperative learning Accountable talk Student inquiry Students are able to demonstrate/discuss learning Students make connections to learning Classroom environment conducive to learning Positive teacher/student relationships Clear expectations I had grouped some of the responses that were similar so it was easier to distinguish the frequency.  I then asked six people to rank the top 10 (one of the six was also a freelist responder).  You could really see the differences in thought when you look at how people ranked the things you would see in a productive class.  You could see who felt classroom management was more important and who focused more on content and actual learning.  With the difference in thought, I can see why the state is having such a hard time developing a teacher evaluation tool.  Certain people see certain aspects of the classroom as more important than others.  All ten characteristics of a productive classroom are obviously important and they all fit hand-in-hand.  But, how do you really put all the characteristics into an effective evaluation tool?  I know, I'm rambling . . . I asked the same six to sort the ten characteristics into three groups.  After using the Anthropac to plot the groupings, it appears that the groupings tend to focus on what was student-centered and what was teacher-driven.  It would have been interesting to see this on a larger scale, just to get a better idea of what the general thought on the topic was, and I should have maybe asked people outside of the field of education.  That may have resulted in some interesting perceptions of what the general public thinks goes on in a classroom.  As for the Anthropac program.  I had difficulties with it yesterday and could not get it to work as was instructed in the handout.  However, I noticed that there were two application outside of the Anthropac application -- one for freelist and one for pilesort.  That was much easier to use.  However, I had to list the items vertically in a column rather than in a row and it worked fine.  I also used it to average my rankings (I did a separate freelist with the rankings).  I am going to attempt to attach it to this.  I hope it was okay to use that program and I hope this is okay for a blog and that it works . . .  I guess I'll find out.  =) I should really get to class now. productive classroom.xlsx freelist.TXT classroom.freelist.adjusted.TXT classroom.freelist.rank.TXT classroom pilesort.labels.BMP classroom pilesort.respondents.BMP Responses: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aj8ALj3EUl5zdEdUcDJCMnBFcmtxdWwwUzJXWUMtR2c&hl=en_US Freelist (Visual Anthropac): https://docs.google.com/document/d/18YXVjG04koSZsyvNoNJWKlhKgoKnktQFMpUW7PJaN60/edit?hl=en_US Freelist -- adjusted (Visual Anthropac): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Kicf5fZ0NvZIY1G4_RmxduOltOtfnFeGi1lmTMCXJ1w/edit?hl=en_US Freelist -- rank (Visual Anthropac): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VDArSnEJLIT2H5LI0VJmQucYwDkFh1UtDw-L3wA9hC8/edit?hl=en_US Pilesort -- classroom characteristics (Visual Anthropac): https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0Bz8ALj3EUl5zZjMyMDM2ODMtMWE5Yi00ZWVmLTg1NDYtOWQwNGE5MDk1ZDll&hl=en_US Pilesort -- respondents (Visual Anthropac): https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0Bz8ALj3EUl5zM2VhNDI2MGYtOTUzNC00MjAzLTgzOTItZWFhMzhlNTRjZDI3&hl=en_US