It’s a great thing to be able to greet  students at the beginning of the year and then hand each one of them a  simple “gift folder” with an official-looking cover page on it, and say:

“Here, this is for you. Write your name on it. It’s your personal “exam review” folder.  See the table of contents? With the checkboxes? This tells you what material you will be adding to it, gradually, so that you can have all the material you need to review in one place, before your national exam in January /May.

Yes, you will be graded on it. A grade that really will be part of the grades that make up your final grade.

You’re welcome”.

My Deaf and hard of hearing students high school students need very clear “road maps” showing where we are going and what is expected of them.

And everyone likes getting a personal gift!

Quite motivating, right?

WARNING!  WARNING!

This wonderful plan of having students build their own review folder can backfire completely.

I should know.

I stopped trying to do this years ago because

(let’s be polite here)

the results were unsatisfactory.

Then what am I doing here sharing the personal exam review folders that my strong twelfth grade students will be getting on the first day of class?

Isn’t Einstein supposed to have said that it’s insanity to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results?!!

Ah, but I’m NOT doing the same thing.

I think I figured out what went wrong before.

The Pitfalls

1. I didn’t include a grade for completing the folders in the semester’s grade. Some students, particularly the strongest ones who did well on their first exam of the year, saw no reason to work on their folder. They could succeed without bothering with it, as far as they were concerned.
2.  I didn’t ensure the students made every single element of the folder personal. The folders included photocopied – ready-made pages that the students got. They didn’t create their own sample sentences or even copy out such lists as
   “useful adjectives”  or “connectors” in their own handwriting (or typed it up themselves).  They didn’t really review material they hadn’t written themselves.

But all of the above is “peanuts” compared to the major mistake I made in the past:

The exam review folders were mainly or exclusively for reading comprehension skills. I included sample types of questions, warnings about common errors, useful vocabulary, and tips about which questions to do first or last.

However, reading comprehension is a very complex skill, particularly for my Deaf and hard of hearing students with their general language difficulties and lack of general knowledge.

You can’t break reading comprehension down completely into a discrete set of skills.

Thus some students ignored the review material and did well on the finals while other students reviewed the material thoroughly and still did badly. Those students usually score poorly on reading comprehension exams in their L1 as well.

Not good.

So…

My twelfth-grade students, at what is called here “the five-point” level, have a writing task. They are required to write a 120-140 word composition on a given topic. Part of the grade is given for using advanced language elements such as “the passive voice”, “connectors” and “gerunds” or varied “rich” adjectives.

The students do not need to use every possible element in every composition but they certainly need to study and review these elements before the exam.

I discuss these elements with the students all the time.

I can define the elements and they are clearly connected to the final grade on the writing task.

And now I’m requiring students to personalize every single sample sentence.

Conclusion

Personal exam review folders will be given only for the writing tasks on the final exams, not the reading comprehension sections.

Here is what my 12th-grade students at “level G” will be getting.

 My Personal Exam Review Folder cover sheet

Table of Contents Module G 

I think it will rock!

I’ll let you know…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a big fan of puffins.

Puffins,  as in the birds, though I certainly like a great many Puffin Books as well! Puffins are beautiful, cute, and versatile – they can fly AND swim!

I understand these birds are incredibly popular in Britain and in many other countries, but they aren’t that well-known in my part of the world. My students are not the only ones who comment in puzzlement about the “strange duck” I use as a profile picture!

While the puffin may seem like an unfamiliar creature to my students, I have recently learned that our shared life in the classroom has more in common with puffins (and pufflings!) than I ever imagined.

How did this newfound knowledge come my way?

“Planet Puffin” is a wonderful podcast composed of short episodes of varying length (ranging from 5 to 15 minutes) and varied modes of presentation: “A regular podcast from PM on Radio 4 on all things puffin. Both the silly and the serious; the scientific and the cultural”.  Many thanks to Elizabeth Evans Cicconi for telling me about it!

The only thing they don’t discuss in the podcast are the similarities between “Planet Puffin” and “Planet Classroom”, so I take it upon myself to highlight the forgotten issue.

1. Puffins look very different in the winter.  They lose the colorful beaks and the black mascara-like markings around the eyes. They lose their wing feathers and become flightless too.

Students and their teachers also exhibit marked changes in their looks between winter and summer, though the changes often progress in opposite directions.

In winter students often seem unable to fly – they simply don’t shine.  Their teachers despair over their inability to grasp the material, to behave themselves and wonder if the students will ever be able to fly independently. Yet by the time the summer finals arrive, the students flex their wings and fly, in glorious colors!

The teachers, on the other hand, retain their bright, energetic colors well into winter, perhaps all through winter. However,  by the time the summer finals come round, teachers’ feathers have faded and become dun-colored, their beaks sag and their movements seem sluggish.

2. So very needy

Pufflings are always hungry. They stay in their burrows while the parents fly off, again and again, day after day, to find fish for them. “Puffin parents can supply their young with fish more than 100 times a day”.

If we ignore the fact that students (particularly adolescents) seem always ready to actually eat, students are just as needy as the pufflings. In order to “feed” them properly, teachers find themselves spending far more time on their students’ nourishment than the allotted 4-5 teaching hours (per class) a week.  Breaks between lessons dissolve into “meet the student” time, or yard duty,  “free periods” are devoted to grading, preparing material, running after the computer technician, searching for printer paper, attending staff meetings and answering students questions on WhatsApp while attending in-service training courses.

The ratio is different, of course – pufflings are “only children” – one puffling a season…

3.  Sometimes pufflings need to be rescued

When pufflings are ready, they must leave their burrows for the first time. Having never seen the sea or been in the fresh air, they must now find the edge of the cliff by moonlight and the sound of the sea and fly away.

Most pufflings do all of this as planned.

Some don’t.

Some pufflings are led astray by human temptations, such as the sound of a generator or artificial lights. They need to be rescued from boiler rooms and kitchen cabinets and brought back to the clifftop.

Others set off in the right direction but get tangled in the nettles, their little feet becoming paralyzed. They are completely unable to move forward on their own.

Just like some of our students who lose their way. They need extra help, special attention or intervention, and second chances (or more!).  They have the ability to “make it”, but they can’t fly off without extra help.

4. A strong sense of place

Puffins return to the same place, year after year, after spending the winter out at sea.

Many teachers, myself included, return to the same school, the same classroom, year after year (after year…) ready to get new pufflings set on their path to the open sea.

No, it’s not boring and it’s never exactly the same.

Pufflings all look adorable to us humans but in the classroom, we sometimes have to remind ourselves to see the students as pufflings and find that “lovableness” in them that simply hasn’t yet manifested clearly…

There are more comparisons to be made but I’ll let you listen to the podcast yourselves.

Three cheers for puffins and teachers!!!!