Archive of ‘Improving Student Learning’ category
Text Complexity
Text Complexity Grade Bands and Associated Readability Ranges
| Grade | Lexile 2010 | Revised Lexile 2011 |
| K-1 | N/A | N/A |
| 2-3 | 450-790 | 420-820 |
| 4-5 | 770-980 | 740-1010 |
| 6-8 | 955-1155 | 925-1185 |
| 9-10 | 1080-1305 | 1050-1335 |
| 11-Uni-ready | 1215-1355 | 1185-1385 |
Making Thinking Visible by Ritchart, Church and Morrison
This paragraph strikes a chord with me:
“In most school settings, educators have focused more on the completion of work and assignments than on a true development of understanding. Although this work can, if designed well, help foster understanding, more often than not its focus is on the replication of skills and knowledge, some new and some old. Classroom are too often places of “tell and practice.” The teacher tells the students what is important to know or do and then has them practice that skill or knowledge. In such classrooms, little thinking is happening. Teachers in such classrooms are rightly stumped when asked to identify the kinds of thinking they want to do because there is ‘t any to be found in much of the work they give students. Retention of information through rote practice isn’t learning; it is training.”
The opposite is also a problem, that is when the class is full of activity, but the students don’t really understand the point of the activities.
In order to understand thinking requires:
1. Observing closely and describing what’s there
2. Building explanations and interpretations
3. Reasoning with evidence
4. Making connections
5. Considering different viewpoints and perspectives
6. Capturing the heart and forming conclusions
And two additional thinking moves;
7. Wondering and asking questions
8. Uncovering complexity and going below the surface of things.
Additional types of thinking that are useful in the areas of problem solving, decision making, and forming judgments include:
1. Identifying patterns and making generalisations
2. Generating possibilities and alternatives
3. Evaluating evidence, arguments, and actions
4. Formulating plans and monitoring actions
5. Identifying claims, assumptions, and bias
6. Clarifying priorities, conditions, and what is known
iPads in the classroom
http://learningandsharingwithmsl.blogspot.com.au/2013/08/using-green-screen-technology.html?spref=tw
http://learningandsharingwithmsl.blogspot.com.au/2013/08/using-ipad-in-grade-one-more-ideas-one.html?spref=tw
These two blog posts by Ms Lirenman are something I would like to follow up on in terms of effectively using iPads in the classroom.
Assessment Portfolios
categories: Improving Student Learning, Professional Learning
At a recent Professional Development session focused on Assessment in Mathematics the presenter referred to Assessment Portfolios as passé. Slightly offended, I have reflected on my use of these and pondered changes for the future.
I have utilised Assessment Portfolios since being inspired by a Windows on Practice document, ‘Work Assessment Books: A Learning and Assessment Strategy’ (Leaker,1991). Over the years these documents have changed considerably, in appearance, organisation and in terms of the audience and purpose. I remember one year our district used these as a way of passing information on from the primary to the secondary school context. Great in theory – but in practice I am not sure whether secondary teachers had time to refer to Portfolios of work for each student.
The main intended audiences for these Portfolios have varied from parents, subsequent teachers, the student and myself, and the purposes have been to show the learning journey, highlight work students are particularly proud of and to communicate how students are going in all areas of the curriculum. At one stage I would carefully section an exercise book into each of the curriculum areas, for each student.
Now-a-days my main purpose for Assessment Portfolios is an organisational tool for students and myself (the main audiences) to manage and store evidence of learning. Currently I use a display folder and purchase inserts so we can add pages as needed. The display books hold personal feedback, examples of formative and summative assessment samples, as well as reference sheets such as Assignment details and criteria for success rubrics. I have also found the folders a useful way to store various graphic organisers and sheets that we use during mental routines, as recommended by Ann Baker.
With the advent of access to digital media I have experimented with class and students blogs, moving toward the idea of e-portfolios. Balancing the need for privacy with the many benefits of sharing learning with a wider audience, has impacted on my current practice. At the moment the on-line blogs reflect students’ learning using a range of media, goal setting and personal reflections, including peer, parental and teacher feedback on their work. The Assessment Portfolios contain the more personalised feedback on learning. I have found both the blogs and Portfolios useful to refer to during report writing time.
I know that many teachers are now using on-line organisational tools such as Evernote to store assessment details. In theory this would be so much more efficient and allow more scope for adding photos, videos and audio recordings. Currently I am conscious of not putting individual photos and names on the public blog to protect students’ privacy. Furthermore, being able to access notes anywhere, anytime and share folders with others would be very convenient. Problems in accessing Evernote at my work site has inhibited this development, but hopefully we can work a way around this issue soon.
Providing Feedback that Moves Learning on
Interesting that through his research Wiliam has found that students respond more positively to feedback when comments are given rather than grades or grades and comments.
Teacher praise is far more effective if it is infrequent, credible,contingent, specific and genuine (Brophy, 1981).
“…feedback is rather like the scene in the rear view mirror rather than through the windshield.” Feedback functions formatively only if the information fed back to the learner is used by the learner in improving performance.
Comparison with sports coaching is illuminating and something I relate strongly with. Feedback on the “how” is important.
“The secret of effective feedback is that saying what’s wrong isn’t enough; to be effective, feedback must provide a recipe for future action.”
“The skill of being able to break down a long learning journey – from where the student is rit now to where she needs to be – into a series of small steps takes years for even the most capable coaches to develop.”
Alfie Kohn (1994): “Never grade students while they are still learning”. As soon as students get a grade the learning stops.
“We need classroom assessment systems that are designed primarily to support learning and deal in data that are recorded at a level that is useful for teachers, students, and parents in determining where students are in their learning. Such fine-scale evidence can always be aggregated for summative reporting. It is not possible to go the other way: from aggregate reports of achievement to learning needs.”
“Feedback should cause thinking.”
…don’t provide feedback unless you allow time, in class, to work on using the feedback to improve their work.
… Feedback should be more work for the recipient than the donor.
Needs to cause thinking rather than an emotional response.
Should relate to learning goals that have been shared with the students .
Should increase the extent to which students are owners of their own learning.
Formative Assessment
Teaching and Learning
Two extremes-
Teacher working harder than the students
Teacher as ‘facilitator’
Ideal teaching- the engineering of the learning environment
Sometimes a teacher does her best work before students come into the class.
The teacher’s job is not to transmit knowledge, nor to facilitate learning. It is to engineer effective learning environments for the students.the key features of effective learning environments are that they create student engagement and allow teachers, learns, and their peers to ensure that the learning is proceeding in the intended direction. That is why assessment is, indeed, the bridge between teaching and learning.
Teaching is a contingent activity. We cannot predict what students will learn as a result of any particular sequence of instruction. Formative assessment involves getting the best possible evidence about what students have learned and then using this information to decide what to do next.
Strategy 1
Clarifying, Shaeing, and Understanding Learning Intentions and Success Criteria
Royce Sadler (1989) wrote:
The indispensable conditions for improvement are that the student comes to hold a concept of quality roughly similar to that held by the teacher, is continuously able to monitor the quality of what is being produced during the act of production itself, and has a repertoire of alternative moves or strategies from which to draw at any given point.
Rubrics cab be useful in this process.
“It is often valuable to develop the learning intentions jointly with the students – a process that is sometimes called “co-construction”. It is important to note that developing learning intentions or success criteria with students is most definitely not a democratic process. The teacher is in a privileged position with respect to the subject being taught and knows more about the subject than the students do, and it would be an abdication of the teacher’s responsibilities to let whatever the students feel should be valued be adopted as the learning intentions. The advantage of developing the learning intentions with the students is that doing so creates a mechanism whereby students can discuss and come to own the learning intentions and success criteria, making it more likely that they will be able to apply the learning intentions and success criteria in the context of their own work.”
As teachers, we are not interested in our students’ ability to do what we have taught them to do. We are only interested in their ability to apply their newly acquired knowledge to a similar but different context.
…good teaching is extraordinarily difficult. It is relatively easy to think up cool stuff for students to do in the classrooms, but the problem with such an activity-based approach is that too often, it is not clear what the students are going to learn. It is also relatively easy, on the other hand, to approach students directly about what you want them to learn, but this often results in unimaginative teaching.
Teaching is hard, because as Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2000) have pointed out, it has. To be designed backwards.
In designing rubrics consider:
1. Task-specific versus generic scoring rubrics
2. Product-focused versus process-focused criteria
3. Official versus student-friendly language
Using students work from previous years
Getting students to design questions for tests
Marking student work and then providing students with a copy of 3 works at a good standard, and asking them to identify what makes them good
Teacher highlighting some good examples in the class and getting students to identify what features make it good
Choose-swap-choose
Student chooses examples of. Their best work eg the best handwritten ‘d’s, then swaps and neighbours also chooses, justifying differences.
Embedded Formative Assessment by Dylan Wiliam
Powerful quotes:
Curriculum v Pedagogy
“A bad curriculum well taught is invariably a better experience for students than a good curriculum badly taught: pedagogy trumps curriculum.”
Textbooks
“Textbooks play an important role in mediating between the intended and the achieved curriculum, and as a result, there has been great interest in finding out whether some textbook programs are more effective than others. Reviews of random-allocation trials of programs for reading in the early grades and for programs in elementary, middle and high school math concluded that there was little evidence that changes in textbooks alone had much impact on student achievement. It was only when the programs changed teaching practices and student interactions that a significant impact on achievement was found.”
SSOs
“As a final example of an effort to produce substantial improvement in student achievement at scale, it is instructive to consider the impact of teachers’ aide in England. One Large-scale evaluation of the impact of support staff on student achievement found that teachers’ aides actually lowered the performance of the students they were assigned to help. Of course, this does not mean that the use of teachers’ aides cannot increase student achievement – merely that they have not.”
Teacher quality – Performance pay doesn’t work
“The desire of teacher unions to treat all teachers as equally good is understandable, because it generates solidarity among their members, but more importantly because performance-related pay is in principle impossible to determine fairly. Consider a district that tests its students every year from third through eighth grade and then uses the test score data to work out which teachers have added the most value each year. This looks straightforward, but there is a fatal flaw: no test can capture all that is important for future progress. A fourth-grade teacher who spends a great deal of time developing skills of independent and collaborative learning, who ensures that her students become adept at solving problems, and who develops her students’ abilities at speaking, listening, and writing in addition to teaching reading may find that her students’ scores on the fourth-grade maths and reading tests are not as high as those of other teachers in her school who have been emphasizing only what is on the test. And yet, the teacher who inherits this class in fifth grade will look very good when the results of the fifth-grade tests are in, not because of what the fifth-grade teacher has done, but because of the firm foundations that were laid by the fourth-grade teacher.”
“The fact that teaching is so complex is what makes it such a great job.”
“The only teachers who think they are successful are those who have low expectations of their students.”
Formative assessment:
“the process used by teachers and students to recognise and respond to student learning in order to enhance that learning, during the learning.”
“assessment carried out during the instructional process for the purpose of improving teaching or learning”
“frequent, interactive assessments of students’ progress and understanding to identify learning needs and adjust teaching appropriately”
A process – not a tool!
Requires 5 elements to be in place:
- The provision of effective feedback to students
- The active involvement of students in their own learning
- The adjustment of teaching to take into account the results of assessment
- The recognition of the profound influence assessment has on the motivation and self-esteem of students, both of which are crucial influences on learning
- The need for students to be able to assess themselves and understand how to improve
An example of formative assessment
An English teacher has been working of figurative language:
Each student has 6 cards with the letters A, B, C, D, E, F
On the board she displays the following
A. Alliteration
B. Onomatopoeia
C. Hyperbole
D. Personification
E. Simile
F. Metaphor
She then reads a series of statements:
- This backpack weighs a ton.
- He was as tall as a house.
- The sweetly smiling sunshine melted all the snow.
- He honked his horn at the cyclist.
- He was a bull in a china shop.
After the teacher reads each statement, she asks the class to hold up a letter card or cards to indicate which kind(s) of figurative language features in the statement.
5 Key Strategies of Formative Assessment
- Clarifying, sharing, and understanding learning intentions and criteria for success
- Engineering effective classroom discussions, activities, and learning tasks that elicit evidence of learning
- Activating learners as instructional resources for one another
- Activating learners as the owners of their own learning
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Where the learning is going Where the learner is right now How to get there Teacher Clarifying and sharing learningintentions and criteria for successUnderstanding and sharing learning intentions and criteria for successUnderstanding learning intentions and criteria for success Engineering effective classroom discussions, activities and tasks that elicit evidence of learning Providing feedback that moves learning forward Peer Activating learners as instructional resources for one another Learner Activating learners as the owners of their own learning
Blooms’ Taxonomy – Setting Assignments
categories: Improving Student Learning, Planning
Depth of Understanding Versus Covering the Curriculum
categories: Improving Student Learning, Reflection
After attending parent teacher interviews tonight, I have been left a bit perplexed. The Australian Curriculum has provided our systems with a common road to travel along, and sign posts along the way to monitor whether we are on the right track. Is the goal to just get to the end of the road, or to actually understand the journey and be able to use the information and apply it to other situations?
I want my children to have depth of understanding, so that if they forget a rule or a step they can actually use a logical order to work out the problem. However, teachers believe that to get that level of understanding they would have to spend considerably more time, and would then be unable to get through the curriculum. So, what sort of learners do we end up with? Students who can remember to follow steps. Will they be able to recognise in which situations they can apply their ‘steps’ to solve a problem?
Surely there has to be more to mathematics than just learning a set procedure to follow.