Low-tech student response system

These past few weeks, I have been preparing the guestroom/spare bedroom as a home office space, the quintessential "room of one's own" for this, my final year -- I hope! -- of the PhD marathon. (Note: I did not say final year of education. That will never end.)

In the process, I have been going through boxes from my teaching days and purging things I could not bear to part with when I left the classroom in 2005.

This time around, some stuff was easier to let go of, such as the crate of office supplies that no longer fit my paperless lifestyle. I hope the ladies at the church rummage sale find a good home for all those notebooks, dividers, and packages of loose-leaf paper.

But other items proved more difficult to dispose of, perhaps because they represent my past life as a classroom teacher in ways that a generic, 3-ring binder never could.

For instance, I located a box of multiple choice "flip-cards" and a set of laminated pinch cards that contain some of the more challenging homophones from our local 9th grade English end-of-course test.

Students used the flip-cards or pinch cards to indicate their answers to sample test questions that I read aloud during whole group instruction. A sort of kinesthetic twist on (yes) the very worst form of call-and-respond, teacher-centered instruction.

These "relics" are less than ten years old, but in these days of automated digital response systems, I was struck by the elegant ingenuity that inspired these homemade tools for active learning and student engagement (inspiration I completely stole, mind you, from another teacher somewhere along the way).

Although these low-tech precursors to modern-day clicker technology were used to prep students for the oppressive onslaught of AYP testing, they also remind me of how teachers improvise and innovate to make time in the classroom (a little?) fun. And when you think about it, the flip-cards and pinch cards and clickers and text-message polls do what the mass-administered, standardized tests will never be able to do: they support real-time, classroom-level assessment with instantaneous feedback to the learner.

So, I am keeping these handmade artifacts, if for no other reason than to remind me of those fast and furious days of NCLB test-prep. And, besides, no one would buy them at the church rummage sale.

Low-tech student response system