Rigor & Assessment in the Classroom: Strategies & Tools, 2nd Edition

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome back to the program Dr. Barbara Blackburn. Barbara Blackburn, PhD, is the author of more than 38 books and a full-time consultant who works with schools around the world to help raise the level of rigor and motivation for professional educators and students alike. Dr. Blackburn has been repeatedly named to the top 30 education gurus and top 10 professional development programs by global gurus. And she is our number one guest on Principal Center Radio.

[00:40]

And I'm honored to have her back today to discuss the second edition of her book, Rigor and Assessment in the Classroom, Strategies and Tools.

[00:49] Announcer:

And now our feature presentation.

[00:51] SPEAKER_00:

Barbara, welcome back to Principal Center Radio.

[00:53] SPEAKER_01:

Oh, thank you so much. It is always a pleasure. Y'all are my favorite place to talk to.

[00:58] SPEAKER_00:

Well, you're our favorite guest, not only because of your excellent books on rigor and related topics, but just because it's a lot of fun to speak with you. So thanks for being here today.

[01:06] SPEAKER_01:

Thank you.

[01:07] SPEAKER_00:

I wonder if we could start by talking about the connection between rigor and assessment. And it seems fairly logical to me that assessment would be a central and crucial topic for rigor because, you know, we can't just guess at rigor. We have to actually assess the level of rigor that we are approaching the learning with in our classrooms. Take us into a little bit of your perspective on that connection between rigor and assessment.

[01:33] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I think it's a core part. My definition of rigor, which came from a lot of years of research, is that rigor is creating an environment in which each student is expected to learn at high levels, each student is supported so he or she can learn at high levels, and each student demonstrates learning at high levels. And that each student demonstrates learning at high levels is assessment. And so...

[01:58]

If we do rigorous activities, if we tell students we hold them to high expectations, and then we give them a basic true false test, we're not actually assessing at a level of rigor. Now you can, if you want to use a true false test, you simply have them for anything that's false, they have to rewrite it as true. That makes it more rigorous. But a true false test in itself is not that rigorous. So it's a little bit of the working backwards. I start with what is my task and then I figure out how I'm going to teach to get there because that's really what you want to do.

[02:31]

And when I look at the task, I go, does this expect students to work at high levels? Is that what I'm doing? Do I have high expectations in this task? And if I'm asking them to write a basic summary, I probably am not. But if I'm asking them to analyze and justify and provide evidence and design their own experiments instead of just doing one, I hand them. Then I have high expectations.

[02:54]

They're demonstrating at a high learning. And from a planning perspective, then I have to figure out how to help them get there. And that's the instruction and the scaffolding piece.

[03:04] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I appreciate, Barbara, that backwards planning process from saying, OK, what kind of learning do we want to assess, you know, in whatever way we're assessing it? And what kind of learning do we want to see on that assessment? And then working backwards from there to plan the learning activities that will build students up to that point. And I'm reminded of the phrase assessment for learning, that it's not just assessment of learning. We're not just trying to measure. We're also trying to increase learning.

[03:30]

the learning that's taking place. How does thinking about rigor and assessment and using some of the strategies in the book actually increase the amount of learning? Because obviously there are better and worse ways to measure learning if that's our only concern, but it sounds like there's a lot more opportunity here.

[03:48] SPEAKER_01:

Well, if you focus backwards and you are choosing rigorous tasks, okay? Now, again, if you choose something basic, that's not going to work. But if you've got a rigorous task and you're planning backwards from it, naturally what is happening is you're planning for depth, not coverage. And that makes a difference. For again, I was in a middle school classroom and the students had to find three sources. They had to choose a topic.

[04:14]

They had to find three sources. Then they had to summarize that information. Then they had to create a PowerPoint and do a video that was embedded in the PowerPoint that told what they had learned. And it sounded so awesome. But when you stripped away all of the glyphs of the technology, students were reading and summarizing. And that is not rigorous.

[04:34]

That is not. It's important and we need to do it, but it's not rigorous. They didn't have to state an opinion. They didn't have to take a stand. They didn't have to justify what they were saying. You know, there was none of that.

[04:48]

They didn't have to go beyond the text. to show they understood it in a broader context. And so it wasn't a rigorous task. On the other hand, a really good one, this is a great science one, and this one's in the book. So it's choose an invasive species such as the cane toad in Australia. investigate how they became invasive, what impact they are having on today's environment, and how the problem can be solved.

[05:13]

Now that by itself is pretty rigorous, but you keep going. Now you are a social media influencer. Create a campaign to teach people about the invasive species. Create a logo that represents the campaign and develop at least five social media postings, blogs, videos, et cetera, to advocate for your solution. So the level of what students are being expected to do there is much, much higher. And that's really what you want.

[05:38]

You want a very high level assessment. And again, You may be thinking, well, my students couldn't do that. Well, they may not all be able to do that. That's where your instruction comes in. That's where your scaffolding comes in. That is so important.

[05:52]

I wrote a whole book on that called Scaffolding for Success because you do have to be able to scaffold them. You don't give up on them doing the rigorous activity. You help them get there.

[06:02] SPEAKER_00:

That's exactly where a lot of those assessments that are just true false, that are not very rich, that are not very interesting, that don't tell us very much come from is that we don't see how our students could do anything more. But as you said, so much comes down to the planning and the scaffolding and the building up of the kind of the pieces that students need. Well, Barbara, we've been talking about kind of the summative aspect of assessment, you know, where we ultimately want students to end up and planning backwards from there. But you also have a chapter on formative assessment for rigor. And I appreciate the real-time information that formative assessment gives us because it allows us to make adjustments. What's your view of the role of rigor in formative assessment?

[06:44]

And what are some strategies from chapter four that you want to share with us?

[06:48] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I think if you... want students to work at rigorous levels, you have to be formatively assessing as they go. Otherwise, you don't know where they need help. Students aren't going to get to rigorous tasks on their own.

[07:02]

We don't get to rigorous tasks on our own. For those of you listening, if you think about your first year as a teacher or your first year as a principal, you probably needed help. You probably had to ask some questions. You probably needed to go to someone show them something and ask them if you were doing it right. Those were formative assessments. And if you didn't have them, you probably would have made a mistake.

[07:22]

I mean, we all did. I certainly did as a teacher. And so formative assessment is what helps us understand where students are and where they need help instead of just trying to give them general help that may or may not hit the mark. My mom has an infection right now. My mom is 92. She has Alzheimer's.

[07:42]

She can't always tell what's going on. but she has an infection and they gave her an antibiotic for it. Well, after 10 days, the antibiotic isn't working. So they called us yesterday and they're going to give her a different antibiotic. But what they're going to do is a blood test that will show exactly which antibiotic she needs. That's also formative assessment.

[08:04]

because you need to know exactly what support they need. So for example, I may just need to know yes or no on something. And if so, I can use a dual response card and just have the students give me a yes or no or a thumbs up or a thumbs down if I just need to know if they understand something. Pretty basic, I can do that. But a lot of times, I need to know more than that. I need to know if they're making applications across different areas.

[08:32]

So make it new that's in the book gives them a four column chart and they have to fill out how what they are learning applies to another book or text, how it applies to me, how it applies to the real world and how it applies to something else. Now, if I get that formative assessment, I get an entirely different set of information because I find out what they know. I find out how they're making those applications, how they're thinking and I find out if they're making those connections. Now, another one that's really good is to have them doing some self-assessments. And you may take the task and have them do two rows of thinking. The first row is they think about what they know and then how they know it.

[09:18]

But the second row is they think about what they don't know and what they can connect it to. And again, I'm getting at different information there. So it's diagnostic information and you have to really pick the right formative assessments to get the information you need. And that really makes a difference in how effectively not only students learn, but how effectively you instruct.

[09:43] SPEAKER_00:

And one tool that a lot of people might not even think of as an assessment tool that you highlight in the chapter on formative assessment is simply observing students, thinking about what do I need to see students able to do and not actually necessarily giving them something that you would think of as an assessment. But talk to us about observing a little bit.

[10:01] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's funny because when I talk to people about observing, they go, isn't that like a kindergarten, first grade thing? And it is, but it's an everybody thing. And you start with just a simple observation checklist. And it's not necessarily the knowledge piece. I find them to be very important for the process piece of learning. So a math one might be a student demonstrates problem solving.

[10:27]

And you can do it as a check off, yes, no. And then a space for evidence if you want to put it. Student persists when they are stuck. Student asks for help when they need it. I mean, those kinds of things are also important. And, you know, they're not the content piece.

[10:43]

Content pieces a lot of times can just get measured quicker in other tools. But an observation checklist really, really lets you see, what students can and cannot do in terms of their thinking. And you can use them for all subject areas and really all grade levels. And so I think that's really important.

[11:04] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and the record keeping there, I think, is something that often elementary teachers are prepared to do or are taught to do with running records and, as you said, kind of observation checklists and logs for observing individual students or conferring with them or looking at their work. but often at the secondary level we don't think about doing that we've got a lot more students and the thinking about assessment is mostly assignment based so i really appreciate your your calling our attention to that and just thinking about the process things you know i was a science teacher and you know one of the things that we have to work on especially at the beginning of the year is lab skills and making sure that students understand how to set up their lab notebook how to handle their materials. And, you know, that was something that I taught, but I didn't really think about assessing it as a discrete skill or as something that I needed to actually keep records on. So I love that.

[11:54]

And I think a lot of people would find that really helpful.

[11:58] SPEAKER_01:

And if you're an upper grades teacher and you're going, I don't want 180 sheets of paper on students. I do that. Here's all you have to do. Okay. Take a page out of your grade book or print a grid off the computer and Do your roster and at the top list what three things you're looking for. And don't do 20.

[12:16]

Okay, don't do that. Do like three to five. You just want some simple ones. Put those at the top. And then when you get to Justin, you put a Y or an N underneath it. And then you can look at your whole class set or your whole student set, if you've got maybe six classes, and see how many Ys and how many Ns did you have.

[12:36]

What do you need to pay attention to in class? It gives you a good way to get that overall formative assessment to inform your instruction.

[12:44] SPEAKER_00:

and so many implications for grouping and for reteaching. We also talked in that chapter about conferring with students, having conferences with individual students, interviewing students, which again, I think is something that our elementary colleagues probably do more frequently than those of us who taught secondary. Talk to us a little bit about those one-on-one conferences with students.

[13:06] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I think, again, what happens with that is you get more information. So it's about the type of formative assessment it is. Did I do conferences with my students every day? No, that was too much work. It was just too much work. Did I do it?

[13:24]

Well, I actually did with my elementary title one students, but with my general students, I did not. Did I do them sometimes? Yes. And so what you want to do is pick. a particular time or a particular problem. And I'm going to stick with math because we did the observation checklist for math.

[13:40]

Here's some sample observation questions. How did you determine the answer? Were there any steps that were particularly challenging? Is there another way you might have solved this? How would you explain this to another student? And you might not ask all four, but that gives you several.

[13:55]

So what I might do is say, OK, I'm picking week five. OK, we're at about midterm. I want to just sort of get a more focused snapshot. I've been getting big pictures, but I want to get a more focused snapshot. So I say that what I'm going to do that week is have some challenging questions that I can do interviews with students. And I may try to get to just five students a day and do three minutes a piece with them.

[14:20]

knowing that some are going to take longer, some are going to be quicker. And I'm going to do that. And I'm just going to make really quick notes. Again, use your grade book. You can do it that way. And then that may be all I do during an entire nine week period.

[14:31]

I do one set of conferences and that's okay. But I'm going to find out which ones really need reteaching versus me having to reteach it to everybody.

[14:41] SPEAKER_00:

It's one of those things that really, because of the number of students we have at secondary, seems like it's not even possible. But yeah, just being selective about what you're going to talk about and being purposeful and not taking a ton of time with it. But yeah, checking in about something crucial can make a big difference. I'm thinking especially of a big project, like if students are writing a term paper, if students are doing a science project, if there's some sort of larger work that's going on, being able to check in with students individually versus waiting until the end when it maybe is not on track, I think that can make a big difference. Let's talk a little bit more about projects, if we could, because it seems like a lot of our long-term opportunities and opportunities to scaffold for rigor and assess for rigor come into those larger assignments. So if we do have a term paper or a presentation or some other type of interesting project,

[15:31]

that students are working on. We've talked a little bit about working backwards from what we want to see at the end. Take us into some of your thinking about those performance tasks and bigger projects.

[15:43] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I think one of the things you have to think about is how much control do you want students to have versus how much control do you want to have? So for example, a lot of people do projects. Now they may call them something else, but they do projects. And the teacher gives them a project, they do it, and then the teacher grades it. There's really no student input. You know, it's just you're doing exactly what you're told to do.

[16:05]

As you move to project based learning, then student involvement becomes more of the focus. And what I do as a teacher is I do a lot more work prepping them. for what they're going to be doing so that I help them be successful. But then there's problem-based learning. And in problem-based learning, student inquiry is the focus. So they're coming up with their questions.

[16:27]

They're coming up with what they want to learn. They're coming up with how they want to do it. I was with a high school And there had been an accident and a student was killed near the school. And what they were doing, the students came up. They said, we want to try to figure out how to prevent that from happening again. And they got into groups and they each came up with a strategy of how they could prevent future accidents.

[16:51]

And then they went off with that in terms of the project and what they were going to do. And they were really given total freedom and how they could do it. So that is more of a problem based learning. And you may be thinking, oh, you're just, you know, doing words. Well, I'm really not doing words. That's very different from I ask you to go back to the toad one.

[17:12]

I give you that I want you to look at invasive species and then I want you to be a social media influencer. That's more of a project because I'm dictating more of it. And one is not better than the other necessarily, okay? For a lot of students, they're not ready to jump into the total involvement in driving it. I taught struggling students who would not have been able to do that. They simply would not have been.

[17:33]

But I could help them get to higher levels if I structured it for them. So you do have to think about that a little bit. But you want them... in a project or a problem assignment, what you really want them doing again is working at that high level.

[17:49]

So let's say that you've got students who've read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. What they can do is they can think about the other four children, how they misbehaved and how their behavior caused them to have to leave earlier in odd ways. Now they have to create a new character with a different behavior problem and write them into the story. How would this character treat The parents, other people, how would they look? What would their mannerisms be? What would get them into trouble during the tour?

[18:14]

And how would existing characters react to that character? So that's one. There's a lot of choice in that. So it's not just a straight up project. That's more project based learning. But there there's also enough structure for a student who's struggling.

[18:28]

And. In each of those examples, students are working at very high levels. They're not just summarizing. They're not just stating facts. They're really having to create things.

[18:38] SPEAKER_00:

You're speaking to something that Amy mentions a lot when we're talking about project-based learning, that because the scaffolding and the support require planning on the part of the teacher and require thought on the part of the teacher, sometimes it's not best to maximize student choice about the format of the project, right? You don't have to have 15 different options where you could do a poster or a PowerPoint or an interpretive dance or, you know, there are lots of formats that lend themselves to to differently to the particular goals of the project. And you may not be as able to scaffold and assess a student as well if they choose a format that's just ill-suited to the work. And we don't want to constrain student creativity, but we do want to ensure that they learn, right? We do want to set them up for success.

[19:24] SPEAKER_01:

I'm a big believer in limited choice. I'm not a big fan of unlimited choice because students can go off in some directions that I don't want them to go. So I'm a big fan in limited choice. Sometimes what that means is that I give them five choices. Sometimes what that means is I brainstorm with them and we come up with a list and then I choose which of those are acceptable. What I have that I could not find on my computer right now is from one of my earlier books.

[19:53]

And don't ask me which book because I don't know. That is the downside of having 38 books. I do not remember which book it was in. I use something called Does It Count? And if they wanted to do something that wasn't on my list, they had to justify it to me based on C-O-U-N-T. So I will find it and send it to you.

[20:13]

You can post it for folks. But they had to prove to me that what they wanted to do was appropriate because a lot of times it wasn't the format they wanted to go off on. It was the topic. They wanted to do a different topic. And so, again, I really wanted to make sure I'm trying to allow some student choice because of motivation. But I want to make sure that I can keep things manageable.

[20:37]

And there is absolutely nothing wrong with making a decision because it keeps it manageable for you and makes your life easy. OK, there's nothing wrong with that. And I sometimes think we feel guilty. Oh, we should be doing. You know what? Got to make it reasonable because you're in it for the long haul.

[20:53]

And if that means limiting choice, that is totally okay.

[20:56] SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. I'm thinking back to something that I experienced in college, which is that we had the option to do what were called honors contracts. And if a professor gave that option, what that meant was that you could basically write a proposal to exempt yourself from any particular aspect of the class and replace it with something else. So if you wanted to not attend class and instead do a research project on a particular author, or a particular literary movement. If it was an English class, you could do that with subject to approval, but it was pretty wide open. But the thing about that honors contract option was it was completely unsupported.

[21:34]

There were no expectations. There were no criteria. There was no support. So you were completely on your own, which given the setting, given that it was for college honor students, it was fine. And students who wanted to take advantage of that could. And probably didn't need that structure.

[21:51]

But I think often when it comes to choice in K-12, students do need some constraints. They do need some guidance and they certainly need some support and some kind of scaffolding to be successful. We've talked a little bit about, you know, being clear where we want to end up. We've talked about breaking it down a little bit. For teachers who might say, well, I tried to do projects, but a lot of kids just didn't turn anything in, or it just didn't go well, or they just didn't know what to do. What are some common opportunities that you see for students to be set up better for success with projects that may feel a little bit more ambitious than their teachers are comfortable with?

[22:31] SPEAKER_01:

That's a tough question. My biggest thing is what I always found was successful, and I find it successful now when I talk to teachers, is to take things and break it down into chunks. So at a very basic level, Kendra Alston, who's one of my former grad students, she was a middle school teacher. One of the things she did with her struggling learners, because she had some who were really struggling with writing. And so what she would do was give them an index card at the beginning of class, and she would give them a micro topic and they would write about it and put their name on it and she'd take them back up. And she would do that Monday through Thursday.

[23:07]

And then on Friday, she would give it back to them and say, now, if you take them and put them in order, you've just written an essay. And they would write their essay. And I think at the very beginning, those kinds of steps are really important because they, it's not always that they don't want to, it's that they can't, but they don't want to tell you they can't. So you want to give those kinds of things. I mean, I think that it's really important. Let's say that you want to have your science student come up with their own research question and develop an investigation instead of you giving them an investigation.

[23:43]

OK, first of all, you better have done a lot of investigations so they know what it's like. But the next thing you probably ought to do is instead of just throwing them into that is have the class work together. to draft sample research questions and say you know these are just some these aren't all you may want to come up with a different one now you're going to get in your group you can choose one of these you can take one of these and change it or you can create your own and then have them do that and then come back together okay let's look at everybody's questions and you catch it if you need to do anything with it all right now if we think about this what are we going to do next if you if you're going to come up with an investigation what's the first thing you need to decide Well, I think you need to decide what materials you need. OK, is that really the first thing we need to decide? Somebody else says, no, I think we need to decide how we're going to figure this out. OK, that's really good.

[24:32]

So let's just take one sample question. And I put up a question on the board maybe that I've come up with. How would we figure this out? So I'm going to do a lot of modeling and I'm going to do a lot of chunking. And then the students that I know are struggling, I'm going to be staying pretty close. I was telling somebody the other day, my dog is so funny.

[24:50]

I have a little Yorkie and she loves to go out for a walk and she loves to get ahead of me. She'll run ahead of me as far as the leash will take her. But as soon as she gets far out, she turns around, looks. And then runs back to me. And that's how our students are. OK, they want to go, but they also want to know you're still there.

[25:08]

So you've got to sort of take that and make that work. So I think anytime you're doing something new, whether it's a project or something else, I think that modeling and chunking really becomes very critical. And I am going to have things available like I'm probably going to have a checklist of steps. that I'm not going to give out to everybody, but I'm going to have it available so that if I get to one group and they're really struggling with that process, I'm going to hand them a checklist, say this might help. You don't have to use it, but it might help. And I've got those available for students.

[25:37]

I might have a graphic organizer available. This is a generic graphic organizer. I've developed it as part of the overall piece, but I'm only giving it to those who need it. And so those kinds of things are what I find most helpful.

[25:52] SPEAKER_00:

One thing Amy will advise people to do when they're coming up with a project, especially if it's in kind of a novel format, you know, if the product is unusual is she'll say, make one yourself, you know, go through this process yourself, you know, because probably as teachers, we've all written papers, we've all, you know, done science labs and things like that. But if we have a different idea for a product. It may be helpful to actually go through the steps ourselves so that we have some experience figuring out where the sticking points are going to be for students. And so we have an exemplar to show students, you know, here's how I did it and here's how you can do it to provide that support. Barbara, what a lot of this seems to come down to is making the learning richer and more interesting and not simply harder. And I know you talk in your books about how rigor is not just more, it's not just harder, but there are

[26:42]

dimensions to it that enrich the learning. Talk to us about the difficulty angle a little bit, because I think it's unavoidable. Like when we're talking about rigor, we are talking about ambitious learning targets. We are talking about more difficult work to some extent, but not just that. Do I have that right? Take us into your thinking on that difficulty question.

[27:04] SPEAKER_01:

And I'm going to give you another math example, not because I'm a math person, but because I've got a good example with math with it. And math is one of those subjects that people say, no, no. It's just difficult. It's just hard. There is a difference. And let me start by saying more is not better.

[27:20]

Okay. Because honestly, if they can't do 10, they can't do 20. Okay. So just hang that one up. You'd rather have fewer that are more challenging and adding in the value and interest of helps students keep going when they're stuck. That's what it does.

[27:36]

It's the motivational aspect. So my stepson did not, he did not like math when he was in school. He had a bad experience with it in elementary school. He just didn't like it. So he gets to middle school and he's got this great teacher. I mean, I loved her.

[27:49]

So did his dad, which thought she was great. And he came home one day and he said, I've got a project to do. And we thought, oh no, this is not going to go well. And he said, no, I'm really excited about it. And what they had to do, they had been studying geometry. And they had to give a comprehensive view of how geometry applied to life.

[28:09]

I mean, think about that. That's definitely challenging. But she had given him a suggestion. She had talked to him enough that she knew he really liked to skateboard. That's what he did every day when he came home. And he really liked to video his friends skateboarding.

[28:28]

So she suggested that he make a video of his friends skateboarding and explain how all of the different things had to do with geometry and life. Scored an A, turned him around on math. I mean, it was unbelievably fabulous. And that was a very challenging type of task. It wasn't necessarily computation, but he really did have to show what he understood. And I think that is very different.

[28:57]

Let me give you an art example. This one can go upper elementary all the way up. You know, you have students do some kind of an art piece. Fine. That may or may not be rigorous. That's okay.

[29:05]

It depends on what you had them do. But here's where she added in a rigorous piece. She had each student evaluate and critique another one. They were all art critics. And so they were given an example to do and they had to critique it. Now, if you just stop there, they write, well, I didn't think it was very good because, and they don't do a high level of work.

[29:27]

So what they had to do was critique it based on what they had learned in class using specific examples, based on what they had learned in their own art using specific examples, and they had to give recommendations that would apply to life and to the art world. Again, same thing, but instead of just being harder, saying you got to write 20 sentences, it's more depth. And so it's definitely a different way of doing things. Let's do one more because, you know, you and I are bad. We sometimes forget your elementary folks who are listening. OK, so let's do a kindergarten science one.

[30:05]

And this is the one you probably remember doing this in school. I certainly do. You were given a paper cup and some dirt and you planted a seed. That by itself is not that rigorous. But here's what you can do with that instead. Instead of just putting them all on the shelf and they all grow and everybody's excited because they grew, we're going to do something different.

[30:22]

We're ultimately going to let them do that, but we're going to do something different first. You're going to pick where you put your cup and you can put it anywhere. And then every day we're going to draw in our journals what's happening with our seeds. Then we're going to come back together and we're going to compare, but at a very high level, not just compare yours to your partner's, but let's look at everybody's. Who's grew the best? All right.

[30:45]

Why did they grow the best? Where was it located? What did the location have to do with it growing and Justin's not growing? And we really get into the variables of science and we can even move into now. So what did we learn? All right.

[31:00]

We learned that sun helps things grow. Well, what else would that apply to? Well, it would help our garden. OK, what else would that apply to? Is there anything else that sun makes a difference to? And somebody says, you know, my dad's car is faded and it's because he parks it in the sun, not in the garage.

[31:19]

And so you really get into this notion of variables and how they work and how they apply outside of just what you're learning about. Very high level kindergarten example. I mean, very high level kindergarten example. So, again, rigor is also not just for older students.

[31:35] SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. And as you said, it makes the learning so much richer and so much more interesting to think through those aspects. And as you said, not just plant the seed in the dirt, but really think about the different directions we could go with it.

[31:48] SPEAKER_01:

So my former student and dear friend and co-author on several of my books, Missy Miles, really works with me on the technology. She's still in the classroom. And I love that because she's really got a take on what can happen with that. And so, for example, and I didn't know about this technology source, explaineverything.com. It's an interactive whiteboard.

[32:12]

So you can actually watch what they're thinking as they're working. And, you know, a lot of times people use Socrative and Padlet and all of those are really good. But that's just some of the new ones that she's got in here. She's got Kahoot where you can use gaming to review. So for formative assessment. But she was very intentional going through the book, adding in appropriate technology, not just for technology's sake, but technology that would actually help the teacher do his or her job better.

[32:45] SPEAKER_00:

So the book is Rigor and Assessment in the Classroom, Strategies and Tools, now in its second edition. Barbara, if people want to learn more about this or any of your many other books and see some of the resources that you have available, where's the best place for them to go online?

[33:00] SPEAKER_01:

Easy enough. BarbaraBlackburnOnline.com. And go to free and you can find all kinds of things you can go to books, if you want to look at all the different books. But under free there are a lot of templates and activity sheets so you don't have to have the book to use them and you can. wander around you can look at the scaffolding book, you can look at rigor and math and science there's a K five and a 612 version.

[33:23]

There's a language arts social studies. There's a differentiation book. Oh, my gosh, we can't even start. But the good news is this. Justin, you've got podcasts on almost every one of them, I think, so they can listen to any of the other books they want.

[33:34] SPEAKER_00:

Well, Barbara, thank you so much for joining me again on Principal Center Radio. Always a pleasure.

[33:38] SPEAKER_01:

All right. Thank you.

[33:39] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.